The head coach of Donetsk’s “Shakhtar”, Marino Pushich, commented on the new format of the Champions League and his team’s chances of reaching the knockout stage of the tournament. Let’s remind that in the final, 8th round of the group stage, the “miners” will play against Dortmund’s “Borussia”.
Marino Pushich“At the very beginning, I said that the innovations are interesting, but also somewhat complicated, as no one knew how many points were needed to advance. It’s a challenging format, especially if you are unfortunate in the draw and have top opponents, but it’s also very exciting.
We are facing the last game of a format that is being held for the first time, but we continue to fight to advance. It’s a great achievement for us, although we could have had one or two points more — we deserved that. But if someone had told me at the beginning of the competition, when I saw all the opponents we would face, that we would play as we did, and also that in the last game we would have a chance to compete for a place in the playoffs, I would have immediately signed off on that. I think we did quite well.
Although, I repeat, in the match against PSV we could and should have achieved a better result. Unfortunately, the circumstances turned out differently. We gained wonderful experience with many young players who were competing at this level for the first time, as I already responded to your colleague.
This format has a future, without a doubt. It is completely different from the previous one, but I like it. It was just hard to predict the number of points needed. We see very few drawn results, many big teams lost points at the start of the tournament. This makes it challenging for us as well. Overall, it’s a very interesting experience,” Pushich said at the press conference before the match with “Borussia”.
