In the 1/4 he will try to take revenge on Volyn for last season’s defeat

Football / Ukrainian Cup

Today the semi-finalists of the Ukrainian Cup will be determined. A difficult match in the quarter-finals awaits Dnepr. Juande Ramos' team will meet in Lutsk with Volyn, which regularly takes away points from Dnipropetrovsk in the championship and also knocked them out of the cup tournament last season. The current trophy holder, Shakhtar, will host Karpaty. Arsenal vs. Chernomorets and Sevastopol vs. Tavriya will also play on Wednesday.

Competitions in the Ukrainian Cup will resume on Wednesday. Of the clubs fighting for national championship medals, only Dnepr and Shakhtar, which is the current holder of the trophy, will compete in the quarter finals. Last year, Metalist sacrificed the cup tournament in favor of the championship and international matches: in the 1/8, the Kharkiv team, playing with a semi-reserve squad, lost to Karpaty with a score of 1:2 in extra time. “Dynamo” was defeated by the “miners” in the 1/16 - 4:1, as a result of which Yuri Semin was fired from the post of head coach of the Kiev team.

Dnepr, now considered the second favorite after Shakhtar in the fight for the Ukrainian Cup, will today meet on the road with Volyn, which occupies only 13th place in the championship standings. Meanwhile, this does not mean that Juande Ramos' team is guaranteed a ticket to the semi-finals. In the previous tournament, the clubs also played in Lutsk - at the 1/8 stage. Then the Lutsk team, although they acted in the minority, brought the match to extra time and snatched a victory - 3:2. In the national championship, Anatoly Demyanenko’s team also regularly stops Dnepr. So, last season the Dnepropetrovsk team lost to Volyn at home - 1:2. And most recently - on March 31 - their match at the Avangard stadium in Lutsk ended in a draw with a score of 1:1.

However, more factors still point to the superiority of Dnepr. Let's say that Juande Ramos can again count on the help of Evgeniy Konoplyanka. In the last round of the championship, the midfielder, who had recovered from injury, took part in two scoring attacks and helped his team defeat Chernomorets in Odessa - 2:1. But today the disqualified chief designer of its attacks, Eric Bikfalvi, will not play for Volyn. On top of everything else, the football atmosphere in Lutsk is far from ideal. According to Anatoly Demyanenko, the club has not paid salaries for three months.

Juande Ramos in Lutsk can again count on the help of Evgeniy Konoplyanka

Shakhtar will continue to defend the National Cup with a home match against Karpaty. At the end of March, Nikolai Kostov’s players managed to give the Pitmen a fight in a home championship game, but they still lost 1:2, ending the match with nine players. At the Donbass Arena, the Lviv team will also be weakened due to disqualifications: today defender Igor Ozarkiv and attacking midfielder Semir Shtilich will not play for Karpaty. Mircea Lucescu's team will certainly not save energy in the cup match. In the national championship, in order to win gold medals again, the Donetsk team only needs to get one victory in the six remaining rounds.

The capital is currently represented in the cup only by Arsenal, which will host Chernomorets today. If this match had taken place a month ago, then the clear favorites in it would have been the residents of Odessa, who were confidently fifth in the championship with a large gap from their pursuers and even declared their claims to higher places. However, the situation has changed. Having suffered defeats from Dynamo (0:2), Shakhtar (0:3) and Dnepr (1:2), as well as drawing with Zorya (1:1), Roman Grigorchuk’s team let the Donetsk "Metallurg" with one point. Such a lead may not be enough for Chernomorets to maintain fifth position and qualify for European competition - perhaps for this they will need the status of a finalist in the national Cup. However, Arsenal is no longer the same as in March, when the team almost completely changed its roster and head coach due to financial problems. The new Arsenal players have already gotten used to each other under the leadership of Yuri Bakalov.

The only representative of the first league in the quarter finals, Sevastopol, will play against Tavriya. At the same time, in the Crimean derby, the favorite will probably not be the top division club from Simferopol. During the coaching work of Oleg Luzhny, “Tavriya” in the championship has one of the worst offensive lines in terms of performance, does not have a consistently organized game and has great difficulty gaining points. Sevastopol, coached by Oleg Kononov, now has the best selection of players and is the leader in the first league.

Sergey Melnik

Average quotes from bookmakers

Match 1X2

Sevastopol--Tavria	2.4	3	2.85
Volyn--Dnepr	6.75	3.9	1.45
Shakhtar--Karpaty	1.09	7.7	18.5
Arsenal-Chernomorets	3.2	3.2	2.1

Newspaper "Kommersant Ukraine" No. 66 dated 04/17/2013, p. 8

Authors:

Sergey Melnik

Themes:

Ukrainian football

"Dnepr" is tuning into the Cup wave