2022: results of the year for the national team of Ukraine

30.12.2022 14:15

Photo of UAF press service

In the past year, the national team of Ukraine played only for two months - in June and September.

And there is an explanation for this — the war with Muscovites and failure in the decisive round of the 2022 World Cup playoffs. Because of this, the schedule turned out to be very strange: most of the time - rough preparatory work, and then emergency match mode.

Oleksandr Petrakov's team stopped short of a trip to Qatar. The World Cup 2022 playoffs were held according to an unusual scheme — quartets of contenders were divided into semi-final pairs, the winners of which, in turn, determined the participant of the championship. Overcome the Welsh, despite a convincing game-to-game victory over the Scots, failed, but after the setback, Petrakov's team rallied and took seven points out of a possible nine in three UEFA Nations League matches. And for the first time in history, we played against the Irish national team. The acquaintance turned out to be pleasant.

But in September, Scotland drew conclusions from the summer defeat and organized an unpleasant surprise for the Ukrainians — first on the field, and then in the tournament table.

After that, the blue-yellow team did not enter the football field. In October, windows for matches were not foreseen, taking into account the very tight international calendar for European championships due to the winter World Cup, which took place in November-December and ended with the triumph of Argentina.

Interesting events in life of the national team of Ukraine in 2022

• For the first time, a legionnaire from the United Arab Emirates played in the national team. Which, by the way, came one step closer to Andriy Shevchenko's scoring record. Yarmolenko has 45 goals for the national team, Shevchenko has 48.
• Artem Dovbyk became the best sniper in 2022. In total, as part of the national team, he has six goals on his account, he is on the threshold of the top 20 scorers in history. Apart from Yarmolenko, Roman Yaremchuk (20 goals), Oleksandr Zinchenko (13), Ruslan Malinovskyi and Viktor Tsygankov (8 each) are among the active footballers in the top-7.
• Vitaly Mykolenko, Oleksandr Tymchyk and Danylo Ignatenko opened the scoring with their goals for the national team. The latter made his debut together with Oleksandr Pikhalyonka and Mykhailo Mudryk. 
• Yarmolenko is the new leader of the rating of guards of the national team (112 matches). Anatoly Tymoshchuk (144) started this year on the first step, but he turned out to be a mankurt, and the UAF punished the traitor deprivation of all awards and achievements. After that, the rating was headed by Shevchenko (111), but in September, Yarmolenko caught up and surpassed his former attack partner and former mentor. And Taras Stepanenko (73) entered the top 10 of this list.
• Andriy Lunin played three dry matches in 2022 (out of three possible). Now he has five out of nine games for the national team without conceding goals. And he has the third most dry matches in the history of the national team. For 30 years, we had two giants of the goalkeeping business — Oleksandr Shovkovskyi and Andriy Pyatov, who together have 194 games for the national team (93 of them — without conceding goals). The rest of the goalkeepers did not play very much (Georgiy Bushchan, 15, is the third in the ranking according to the number of matches played), so Lunin has so far only detached himself from the general public. But, given his young age, the goalkeeper of "Real" has the opportunity to try to catch up with the titans.
• But Lunin's dry streak (297 minutes) ranks only 13th in our history. The record belongs to Pyatov (752). By the way, he renewed another achievement: with an indicator of 37 years and 347 days, the goalkeeper is the oldest football player of the Ukrainian national team.
• Oleksandr Petrakov brought the number of matches at the head of the national team to 15. And this is the eighth result in the biography of the national team of Ukraine. The record is held by Oleg Blokhin (64).

All matches of the national team of Ukraine in 2022

The composition of the national team of Ukraine in 2022