Sudakov: It is my personal dream to play against Barcelona

– Heorhii, share your first impressions after communicating with the new coach. What did Marino Pusic talk about? What did he put focus on?
– I have positive emotions, everyone was impressed after the theory session. First of all, he is a good, positive person. And we supported the idea that he gave us in 15 minutes and immediately understood his style of football. And I can say that in 15 minutes we understood more than in three months of training prior to that. I hope that we have a very good journey ahead, and we all believe in this. Darijo already said that there will be an absolute trust in the coach on our part, on the part of the players. And I hope that we will achieve great success with this coach.

– Do you remember the time when Chyhrynskyi played for Barcelona? And what are your expectations for tomorrow’s game?
– To be honest, no. I remember that my first football kit was Shakhtar jersey with Darijo Srna. As for Dmytro Chyhrynskyi, I do not remember those matches because I was still very young. Regarding tomorrow’s match, as Darijo said, we are not the favourites of this match, but we are going to play our football one hundred percent, we want to play with the ball. We understand who Barcelona are and what they represent in this world, but we have very good qualities, so we should be confident. I hope that tomorrow we can show our football and have fun to make the fans happy too. I cannot say that we are afraid to play against someone, we are not like that. We want to play against the strongest teams. Last year we played in the Champions League against Real Madrid and we showed a very good game, especially in Warsaw. Maybe we even lost the victory. These are very big matches that we have been going towards all our life. It is my personal dream to play against Barcelona. I do not even want to think about fear, I want to have fun and play as leaders. We understand that it will be very difficult, but there is no fear.

– How does the war in Ukraine affect the team and your life?
– Of course, the topic of war is very difficult for all of us. It caught us in Ukraine, in Kyiv. I was with my pregnant wife during the war, my child was born during the war. It is very difficult, because now we travel a lot, I hardly see my child and wife. But this is additional motivation for us and for all our players. Considering what is happening in Ukraine now, we close our eyes to all our trips, to our exhaustion – we no longer pay attention to that. We want to enjoy football and show the entire country how important it is to fight not only on the battlefield, but also on the football field.

– You are a young footballer. What do you think about young players of Barcelona?
– I just saw a young 17-year-old boy scoring the winning goal in the last match of Barcelona. So, I can say that La Masia does a very good job and that incredibly talented players are gathered here. When I played against Barcelona with U16 team, they had very good players with amazing qualities. Although they are young, they show a very high level of play. So, we do not pay attention to the age, it does not play a big role in football now. There are many great players who already show their quality, character and achieve results at the age of 17–18.