Former Shakhtar forward Danilo Sikan, who joined Turkish Trabzonspor last winter, openly talked about the difficult relationships between Ukrainians and Brazilians in the Donetsk club.
Danilo Sikan“Pushich is a very nice person, and I’m grateful to him for everything he has done for me. Why didn’t it work out? I can say. During that period of the championship, a lot of Brazilians were coming, whom he needed to show everything to, as if telling children.
I understand him perfectly because it’s very hard to work with Brazilians. They always need to be almost beaten every day, I’m being honest. They just later crawl onto your head and put you in the background, and themselves—into the foreground.
I understand Pushich a hundred percent—he is brought Brazilians, and he has to educate them, show them how to press, but they know nothing. I saw this myself when we lost a lot of matches in the first round because one of the Brazilians didn’t run somewhere.
This caused conflicts later within the team between Ukrainians and Brazilians. It’s normal, it’s football, and conflict in the team when someone doesn’t do something—you need to understand what you’re playing for. You play for Shakhtar, not for Brazil, here you need to respect each other.
For example, the match with PSV, when Pedrinho received a red card. You understand that your friend received a red card and you need to run three times more because it’s the Champions League, it’s not the Ukrainian championship. This is responsibility at a very high level.
We had complaints against them. Sometimes the coach looked at this situation, sometimes he calmed down. It’s normal. This isn’t a conflict that we were fighting there, we just explained it to them,” Sikan said in an interview on Ihor Tsyhanyk’s channel.
