Vladyslav Lupashko, photo FC Karpaty Lviv December 6, 2025, 11:00 a.m

The day before, Lviv Karpaty lost to Luhansk Zora in the away match of the fifteenth round of the Ukrainian Premier League.

Zorya — Karpaty 1:0 Video of the goal and review of the UPL match

After the end of the game, the head coach of the “Lions” Vladyslav Lupashko commented on the performance of his own team.

“To sum up the match, I think we played with a good team, which is European considering the fact that they put a lot of emphasis on the physical qualities of the players, they are very powerful. Almost the whole team can work in standard positions and win duels, so I think they are quite effective in one-on-one play.

I believe that in the first half, Zorya primarily used this advantage. It was in physical martial arts that she won many of these duels. We focused on this during the break and tried to make these duels less. But in order to beat such teams, you have to win these duels.

I understand that the ball needs to be more from the bottom in order to be effective against them. However, this could not be done in the first half.

We spent the second half of the match more efficiently, had more approaches, positional attacks and had moments. This should have been done from the beginning of the game. I agree that we played for the goals scored.

We shouldn’t have lost this game because of what happened on the football field, but we have to take those moments. Some players have not been in those positions that we talk about, that we coach and that we emphasize in order to score goals. For each position there is the easiest point you have to be in for it to be a goal.

Despite the fact that we created moments. Many of them did not end in danger, because we did not occupy these points of which I speak.

I’m talking about this not only about this match, but also about the match against Metalist 1925. If we take Kryvbas, there were also a lot of hits, but not from the attackers. This applies not only to two matches.

Our main problem is the lack of aggression in the offensive line. Not all players, but most. There must be a desire to score goals, we must be aggressive. If the team finds itself in the third zone, it must be hungry enough to create chances to touch the ball.

Today, Budkivskyi had one moment and he realized it. This is an attacker class. He did not touch the ball after that. Our attacking players can have eight touches on the ball in the penalty area. Sometimes even more, but the conversion is small. This is the problem and our biggest flaw right now.

We played against a fairly strong opponent, physically strong. We had to bend our line, we had to shake them up, we had to try to draw them out, make them uncomfortable. When they were already losing strength and concentration, they had to implement what they created in the second half.

Yes, we missed it, but it cannot affect the course of events. There should be a higher quality in the final third. Zorya had Budkivskiy’s moment, which he realized, Popar had an opportunity – I don’t remember more dangerous moments. We had more of them, but the score is on the scoreboard. It was the same with Veres and Metalist 1925. We lack implementation and quality in the penalty area,” said the Ukrainian specialist.

In the next round, Lviv Carpathians visit Zhytomyr Polissia.