Macedonia vs. Ukraine — 1:0
After half a year’s work as coach of the Ukrainian national soccer team, Oleh Blokhin has not been able to add a single victory to the team’s assets, although the adversaries in the three friendlies under the new coach’s supervision were anything but elite: Macedonia in two meets and Libya in one.
The third performance, using Blokhin’s stratagem, was also his third team structure option. The players, clad in yellow-blue attire, appeared on the field in the Macedonian capital March 31, only to show that same unimpressive style with a number of blunders as in the previous team structures.
The host team had never claimed any special status in the soccer world, and was not likely to claim any in the foreseeable future. Suffice it to say that Mitreski, Moscow Spartak’s substitute player, was effectively in Macedonia’s central defense. Sedloski was probably the only name familiar to the Ukrainian fans (he had played for Zagreb Dynamo vs. Kyiv Dynamo and Dnipropetrovsk Dnipro last year, showing little worth writing home about).
And so the mediocre players sporting red Macedonia T-shirts successfully attacked Shovkovsky’s goal in the first half, scoring at the 26th minute, and effectively rebuffed Ukrainian sporadic assaults in the second half. The Ukrainian team emerged as a set of separate elements actually failing to interact during the game. On the left flank of attack, Rotan and Rikun (Dnipropetrovsk) tried to play the kind of soccer they were used to while on the Dnipro team. Now and then they would be assisted by another club member, Nazarenko. On the opposite flank, Parfionov from Moscow Spartak and Husev from Kyiv Dynamo failed to adjust to the tempo, albeit common to both.
Obviously nothing was left of the Lobanovsky style, which the Ukrainian national team had adhered to — or had tried to adopt — in previous years. It is still anyone’s guess what kind of soccer the Ukrainians had tried to play on that particular occasion. Nor did Andriy Shevchenko justify the hopes placed in him, failing to score a single goal in 45 minutes, actually missing every time he aimed. And the finale of his performance turned out scandalous. He simply walked off the field after clashing with a Macedonian player.
The Ukrainian national coach Oleh Blokhin acted as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, keeping a poker face, watching as the Milano star openly scorned him and the rest of the Ukrainian national team. In the second half, without Shevchenko, the Ukrainians showed a more active performance, mostly because Macedonia had consciously switched to the defensive.
Only an inveterate optimist can believe that the Ukrainian national team is capable of winning the qualifying tournament. What can the current coach offer as an essentially new approach in the next couple of months? Try three team structures in the games left to play? The team so far does not have a game model as such; it has no soccer ideology of its own. Of course, candidate members will burn with enthusiasm and trip over themselves to prove their worth, but this is not enough to defeat even a backwater provincial team like Macedonia. And the Ukrainian soccer fans cannot expect victories relying only on Shevchenko’s talent.
Ukrainian soccer appears to have relied on the legendary bombardier Shevchenko to score any degree of success in the international arena since 1997, but the national team’s results have been going from bad to worse. No use making self-evident conclusions. We have a national team and its coach who is to be held responsible for the team’s performance, and Oleh Blokhin may be brought to account considerably earlier than he expects.
