The head coach of the Ukrainian women's beach soccer team, Yuriy Klimenko, summed up the team's performance at the Neom Beach Soccer Cup 2024 in Saudi Arabia.

The Ukrainian women's national beach soccer team secured third place at the prestigious Neom Beach Soccer Cup 2024. In the group stage, Ukraine lost to Spain (1:6), defeated England (4:2), and lost to Brazil (4:5). After finishing third in the group, the blue-and-yellow team advanced to the consolation final where they lost to England (5:4). The results of our girls were commented on by their coach Yuriy Klimenko.

"I want to first and foremost highlight the excellent organization of the tournament. This was a top-level event. Judging from everything, Saudi Arabia clearly wants to host world championships in the coming years.

Regarding our final result in Neom — we are not fully satisfied. We believe that at this tournament, we should have played in the final. For example, in the first match against Spain, we started well and were ahead on the score. However, afterwards, our functional state and four technical errors we made in one game ultimately did not allow us to give Spain a real fight.

After this meeting, we held general training sessions, talked with the girls, and decided how to play the next matches for a positive result. Against England, we basically had no problems. We understood how our opponent would act, imposed our tactics on them, the girls executed their game plan and won 'with ease'. And in the decisive match against Brazil for a place in the final, we actually beat the opposition. We did not give space to their attacking players, blocked flanking positions, and played densely in the central defensive zone.

We withstood the initial pressure from Brazil, scored two goals, and everything was going well. But again our technical errors intervened. We conceded the second goal due to a misunderstanding when changing quarters. An unpleasant moment that could not be allowed at this level. With the third goal in our net, the referee did not see an obvious foul by the opponent on our goalkeeper. They also did not award us a clear penalty against Brazil with the score 4:4. We have already even gotten used to such refereeing errors — we've developed a kind of immunity. Well, we made conclusions and move forward.

Photo AFP

I will repeat once again, we should have played in the final. What would have happened there is unknown, of course, as Spain was very strong at this tournament. But still, considering this year's recharging in the national team with many new players, we are satisfied with their actions and hope for productive work next season where more ambitious tasks await them.

The main problem of our team is that we spend very little time before official competitions with the main squad and do not manage to establish team interactions. We plan to hold general training sessions with friendly games before tournaments in the next season, as well as arrange for teams to release girls earlier. This is very important for achieving results," — said Yuriy Klimenko.