Yuri Maleev: «We need to go one or two steps up»

Belarus national women's team head coach Yuri Maleev commented on the first UEFA European Championship 2021 fixture against the Faroe Islands.

- As I have already said I am happy with the score as it is a 6:0 victory but I am not happy with the game we showed especially in the first half. We will need to work a lot expecially on the tactival aspects in order to show a better game against Norway and Wales. 

- You replaced Margarita Yushko at half time and Kubichnaya started playing more on the right side. What caused this decision?

- You probably noticed that we did not have a good start of the attacks. I am not sayin Margarita is a bad player, she is a good player, but at this moment we really needed to start the attacks with the ball low as the opponent did not let us move from the defense easily. This component did not work for Margarita which is why we replaced her. 

- It was your plan to start the attacks through Kubichnaya? 

- No. It is also a question for me why this happened as we prepared in a certain manner and had training matches were everything went quite well. We were expecting to enforce the midfield with Anna Koziupa. The game didnt go really well but we need tol find out all the reasons. I am not ready to give you an answer right now. Perhaps it has something to do with the pitch. When the girsl play on a humid pitch they start to lose coordination. We made certain corrections taking the sitation into account and started playing better in the second half. 

- It was slippery indeed today. It looked as though the girls were not used to the natural grass. Did you consider playing on an artificial pitch?

- No, we trained on a natural pitch of high wuality during our camp which lasted eight days. The pitch at «Borisov-Arena» is very fast. It is looked after well and the grass is cut well and the balls moves quite quickly. After the pitch watering it gets even more fast and todays rain made the ball movement two or three times as fast. In such conditions every bad pass led to a rebound, a loss or a mistake. I think that «Borisov-Arena» as a stadium has nothing to do with it. On the contrary such a stadium raises the status of the match and I hope that we can play the following matches here as well.

- The team has an interesting calendar. Four games at home and then four fixtures away. Was this the decision of the coaching staff or perhaps the ABFF?

- It is hard for me two say. I have been assigned recently and I am working in the existing conditions. It is an interesting calendar but maybe that is for the best. Anyway all teams have to play each other home and away. We will see how it works at the end of the campaign. Off courese it would probably be better to divide the matches and have home and away games changing one another but I cannot do anything at the moment. It turns out we start with four home games while Norway kicks-off with four away fixtures.

- Have you had a discussion with the ABFF Board? What are their expectations and what are your expectations of the tournament? 

- I can say that the ABFF Board has fully supported in our preparations. They have provided everything that was requested. As far as the expectations are concerned... We need to push from the bottom and perform better than we did in the last two qualifying campaigns. As you know we finished last in our group twice, which means that now we have to make one or two steps up. I cannot say now that we will beat Norway. We will obviously try to do that and I promise that our game will be better that this one, but I cannot promise that we will win. I can only say that we will show a solid performance against Norway and Wales.