Ilya SIDOROV: “Ukraine showed a good result in Istanbul”

The defender of the Ukrainian national team, Ilya Sidorov, talked about the recovery process after the injury and expressed his views on the performance of the national team in the preliminary rounds of the 2024 Olympics.

– You missed the last matches of the national team due to the operation. How is the recovery going, are you ready for training?

Yes, I’m cured. From August 20, the doctors let me start full-fledged training, but for now we have more work to do at the club, stadium and gym, and 5×5 matches are scheduled for next week for contact training. Everything is fine so far, I feel normal.

– How did you find the match of the national team in Istanbul?

– It is clear that everyone is a maximalist, but if you really evaluate, the result is good. We held a quality tournament with the Bulgarians, we lingered a bit, but at the end of extra time we proved our advantage, we won where we should have beaten Iceland. Things didn’t work out for Turks and Croats, but everyone saw what Croatia did against Turkey in the final. This team has very high quality players who will determine the fate of the match and they did it.

Moreover, these were the first official matches of Vitaliy Stepanovsky, the game has changed, the style of the game has changed. It was a pleasure to watch the national team, so I look forward to the next matches, if I am healthy I will definitely be able to come to the national team and help him.

– The next matches will be played in February in the EuroBasket 2025 qualifiers. How do you evaluate your future competitors?

-It is very difficult to talk about opponents when the mid-season auditions are played and extended to 16 months. It’s clear that we have to rank higher than Portugal, that’s not even discussed. You can play Slovenia or Israel without Doncic. In fact, the players in Turkey have shown that we resist enough against Croatia, Turkey, which brought men from the NBA, without too many players. I think that everything will depend only on us in this election, but we have to enter the European Championship and I am sure that all players will come to the national team with this conviction.