A few days ago, the leadership of UAF terminated the cooperation with the head coach of the Ukraine U-17 football team Yuriy Moroz. In a conversation with Sport.ua, the honored coach of Ukraine Yuriy Moroz shared whether this decision by the officials was unexpected and his plans for the future:
— A coaching career is such that you should always have your bags packed… But I took the decision not to continue the contract with me calmly and with understanding. It is important that I am ready for new challenges.
— You started working in UAF in 2022, but the main challenge was related to last year’s performance of the Ukraine U-17 national team, which, unfortunately, turned out to be unsuccessful. What was the reason for the failure?
— Perhaps, those confident victories over the Greeks, Swiss, and Slovaks in the qualification played a negative role. The guys overestimated themselves somewhere, got a bit of a “star,” and were careless in preparing for Euro at the club level. There is also our fault — the coaching staff, which did not reach the players, and that caused problems both with physical and psychological preparation. At least, with that selection of players, Ukrainians should have exited the group stage.
— Still, it was rumored that the performance of our footballers was also negatively affected by the presence of the head coach of the youth national team of Ukraine Unai Melgosa, who interfered with your work.
— There were no problems with him. I would not dramatize the situation. After all, Melgosa was present at the qualifying tournament, and that did not prevent the Ukrainians from confidently winning back then. I repeat, it was a collective shortcoming.
— Among those players who were under your command last year, who might knock on the doors of the national team in the future?
— It’s too early to guess. I can only specify that in that team the leaders were Kyrylo Dihtyar, Bohdan Redushko, Pavlo Lyusin, Artem Stepanov, but it remains to be seen how they handle the difficult transition from youth to adult football. A lot will depend not only on them but also on the club coaches.
It is worth recalling that Vitaliy Mykolenko and Illia Zabarnyi were also minimally involved in the national teams of different ages, yet this did not stop them from showing themselves well at the adult level. Many factors matter here.
Taking this opportunity, I want to pay tribute to the specialists who were with me for the last three years: Serhiy Demyantsi, Volodymyr Ikonnikov, Oleksandr Protsyuk, Oleksii Bukach, Yaroslav Ostroshchuk, and Petro Marchuk. Still, there were significantly more achievements than disappointments.
— What’s next?
— At the moment, I do not know where I will continue my career; it could be a youth team or an adult one. By the way, I once led the elite “Chornomorets.” So, I have experience. It is possible that demanding Odesa fans expected more from us, but I believe I did not occupy anyone else's place; after all, from that squad, we now see Maksym Braharu, Vladyslav Vanat, Krystian Bilovar, Mykola Mykhailenko. The main thing is to work qualitatively on correcting mistakes and not to stop.
Andrii Pysarenko