Yurii Shturko: We lost focus a bit, and that became the deciding factor

Post-match comments following the Round 10 fixture of the 2026/2027 UPL-2 Youth Championship between Bukovyna U-21 and Kryvbas U-21 (1:0).

Yurii Shturko, Senior Coach of FC Kryvbas U-21:

"In our view, the decisive goal came from a simple situation - the ball just needed to be cleared, and that would have been that. It was a basic technical error. I believe we essentially scored this goal against ourselves; had the ball been cleared, nothing would have happened. There was still over ten minutes left to play, and I think we could have even scored ourselves. But that’s football - that’s how it went today, so we’ll keep working. There are plenty of questions to address; we’ll analyze our mistakes and prepare for the next match.

After the game, I thanked the lads. They invested a lot of energy and emotion, but they lost their concentration for a moment, and that proved to be the deciding factor. While both teams faced the same conditions, we were playing on an artificial pitch, which led to a lot of errors - at times, it was even difficult to control the ball technically. All of this combined resulted in a negative outcome. We will analyze this match, study our opponent, and prepare as usual for the upcoming game against Dynamo Kyiv U-21."

Mykola Kudriavtsev, Midfielder for FC Kryvbas U-21:

"We’ll evaluate everything in more detail once we’ve reviewed the match, but for now, I can say this: the desire was definitely there among the lads." We performed well in the qualifiers, but our finishing let us down once again - we failed to find the back of the net.

Naturally, it is deeply disappointing to lose when you have played with maximum commitment throughout the entire match, striving to score and performing quite well overall, only to concede such an unfortunate goal in the final minutes. Could we have avoided that unnecessary goal? Certainly. We simply needed to clear the ball as far away from our goal as possible and extinguish the "fire" near our own penalty area.

Media of FC "Kryvbas" Kryvyi Rih