The general director of RFS in Riga, Maris Verpakovskis, summed up his club's performance in the Europa League, touching on the match with Kyiv’s "Dynamo" (0:1) in the final round of the main stage of the tournament.
Maris Verpakovskis“Of course, it’s a bit disappointing that we couldn’t finish our performance in the Europa League on a positive note. We definitely wanted to say goodbye to this tournament with a victory or at least a draw. It seemed that Dynamo was within our reach.
But speaking overall, I think that the emotions after this last game will be forgotten, while the feeling of a job well done this European season, where we achieved an excellent result, will remain. After all, we advanced to the main stage of the European cup and collected five points here. I’m sure we surprised everyone with our results against such giants as Galatasaray, Anderlecht, and Ajax.
It’s clear that when we entered the main stage of the Europa League, we didn’t fully understand where we were, as we had never played at such a level before. At that time, it was hard to predict whether we would be able to score at least one point or even get some goals. So, if someone had told me at the start of the tournament that we would gather five points, I would have been happy. At the same time, we could have gathered a few more points in some matches and finished a bit higher in the standings. But, of course, things could have been worse, so I believe we showed a good result, which is not worth complaining about.
What’s next? The Champions League! Achieving this is very difficult, possibly only due to some stroke of luck, if we are very fortunate with the draw and maybe manage to defeat a stronger opponent. But we would be very happy if we could achieve something similar to this season. The next step could be to get into the top 24 in the main stage of the European cup and participate in the playoffs in the spring, which no Latvian club has managed to do so far. I think this is quite a realistic goal worth striving for,” said Verpakovskis as quoted by sportazinas.com.
Translation and stylistic adaptation — Dynamo.kiev.ua, when using material hyperlink is mandatory!
