Sport24.az
Ceyhun Aliyev, Krakow
Our national team's 1-week European tour has come to an end. Aykhan Abbasov's team, who spent the last 3 days in Krakow, Poland, lost 1:2 in the match against Ukraine. Sergey Rebrov's team, who took the initiative from the first minutes, won a well-deserved victory. The nominal home side was clearly superior to our national team in terms of ball control, individual quality, effective passes, number of shots on goal and on target, functional readiness, and tactical literacy. In other words, we don't have the privilege of saying "we were unlucky."
So, what did the Azerbaijani national team leave in memory?
Since the day football came to Azerbaijan, our team, which has always looked at Ukrainian football from the bottom up, has finally shown what all the weak do against the favorite. We are talking about zealous struggle. Our players fought for every inch of the field. Yes, the fatigue of the France match did not allow the children to show what they wanted physically. However, despite the fatigue, our players were doing everything possible. For example, he could not show a fresh game against France, he did not have the strength. Bahul Mustafazade, whom we considered worthy of the kindest words with his game against the same French, was not him either. We will not be able to write this meeting to Toral Baytamov's account either. We know his skills, he gave his life on the field, but his legs did not obey him. However, Emin Mahmudov played more dynamically and intelligently today. Elvin Jafarguliyev also deserves the kindest words. Thank God, he seems to be getting wiser too, he doesn't act empty-handed for yellow and red cards.
If our team found the strength after conceding the second goal and was able to besiege Ukraine's goal in a certain part of the game, this was already a new, "8th note"... Yes, the fact that the performers sometimes make late decisions, and in some cases, technical shortcomings did not allow creating a real goal opportunity in that time interval, but this is already a good signal towards the positive.
Finally, I will refer to music again. No orchestra can caress the soul of the audience without a conductor. Look, our national team's new "conductor" has also started on this path. Aykhan Abbasov has improved the quality of the music since his first acquaintance with the orchestra. However, there is still a long way to go for the performers to become an orchestra that plays quality music on the same tone. At the post-match press conference, I asked the head coach, "we are people who have seen a national team that fell into the D division of the League of Nations, and in the current situation, we are observing progress in our team such as perseverance and effective defense. But "appetite comes with eating" and I want to ask when we will learn to build more creative attacks." If we translate the expert's answer into musical language, it would be approximately like this: "We are trying to bring the symphony of darkness to light and we have done enough work in this direction." I agree, Aykhan bey, but on one condition: in each next match, our national team should look not much better than the previous game, but 1 percent better.
