Former midfielder of the Ukrainian national team Yevgeny Levchenko assessed the performance of the team in the Nations League.
— What impression do you have of this Nations League?
— To be frank, it’s a validol. We say that our national team has a promising generation of players, and I believe that is true, but for some unfortunate reasons we are not playing our football. It seems to me that we could see our football in the first 45 minutes (against Albania — ed.). That’s the kind of football we would like to always play. We would like to see that we can get out from under pressure, we can attack, we can put pressure on our opponents. But when we are pressured, when we are under pressure, we still need to learn how to get out from under pressure.
In general, regarding the Nations League, it seems to me that there are a lot of questions about how we are structuring our game, what players we are selecting, how we are making substitutions, who we are positioning from the players in certain positions. I believe that both the coaching staff and everyone understand that we need to play better.
— To what extent do you think the second place and the fight for Division A is a deserved result?
— Listen, we could easily lose to Georgia. Let’s be frank, if we had lost to Georgia, it would have been much harder. I can’t say that we have any games where we played at 100% to the extent that we could say: this game fully belongs to us. This is a wake-up call for all of us to understand: if we are playing and we have problems, then something needs to change, we need to improve.
Yevgeny Vanja