On Sunday, October 27, in the match of the 11th round of the Ukrainian championship, Kyiv “Dynamo” played to a 1:1 draw with Donetsk “Shakhtar”. The match took place in Kyiv at the “Dynamo” Stadium named after Valeriy Lobanovskiy. We present to you the post-match press conference of the head coach of the capital team, Oleksandr Shovkovsky.
— It’s hard to prepare when, firstly, you have to play every two days and, secondly, with such logistics that we take a day and a half to get to and from the match.
We deliberately split our return from Rome to Kyiv into two stages to conduct at least some training preparation. Therefore, on Friday morning we flew to Lublin, settled in a hotel there, had lunch, after which the team had about two and a half hours to rest. Then the players who made the starting lineup for the match against “Roma” stayed at the hotel for rehabilitation activities, while the others went for training. Of course, it cannot be called full-fledged. After that, we had dinner, and then we boarded the bus, reached Chelm, where at 11 p.m. we departed by train towards Kyiv. We arrived at our club yesterday around 12:30.
I told you all this so that you understand the state our players were in on the eve of today’s match.
“Shakhtar” had two more days because they played their European Cup match on Tuesday. And this affected the course of the game. We understood perfectly that we would not have enough freshness today, so we relied on positional play in defense and looked for opportunities in counterattacking actions. We managed to do something, and something — not. At the beginning of the match, there was a forced substitution; Popov went to the hospital, joining Yarmolenko, Pikhalenko, and Sebalyos. How serious everything is will be shown by tomorrow's medical examination.
— Why did Shaparenko not appear on the field today?
— Unfortunately, this morning he received a domestic injury, he had three stitches applied, and he could not go out on the football field.
— Karavaev is the hero of the match. Did you congratulate him on the goal?
— Of course, we congratulated him and the whole team. This goal is the result of effective actions. The ball must first be delivered to the flank, then delivered into the penalty area, then be in the right place, and finally put a finishing touch. We are working on this. Sometimes everything works out. We constantly tell the players how to build attacking actions better, how to build defensive actions better, how to shift, how to interact in lines, on the flanks.
But one way or another, fatigue accumulates. You had to see the players to understand their condition just yesterday.
You can criticize me, say anything you want about me, but many coaches and players pay attention to this schedule, to the number of matches. And those players who represent their national teams are generally working without rest.
So, I repeat, we lacked freshness today. Therefore, the goal scored by Karavaev was indeed very important. Considering the course of events on the football field, we can say that a draw is a decent result for us.
Post-match press conference of Shakhtar’s head coach Marino Pushich
Oleksandr POPOV from the “Dynamo” Stadium named after Valeriy Lobanovskiy
