“We could break away from Sparta and the fourth Baník. We are sad,” added the indispensable man of the Pilsen defense.
At the same time, he himself did not even have butter on his head. Victoria‘s defense conceded one of the set pieces, that happens. But at other times, the dreaded attack seems to have stepped on a vanishing point. The rear line of Slovácko represented an impenetrable rampart. After all, Plzeň forced goalkeeper Milan Heča to make only one (albeit excellent) shot, when Lukáš Červ fired from the edge of the box ten minutes before the end.
“We were losing it. All curls, not much shooting. Lots of standards, but no emphasis. We didn’t even help ourselves with corners and centers from deep in the field,” sad coach Miroslav Koubek. “In the last thirty meters, we couldn’t get through. We didn’t find a way,” added the experienced coach.
Fullback Jemelka had a sublime view of the offensive woes of his otherwise productive teammates. He, too, tried to support the offensive with lunges on the left side with twisting crosses. But Slovácko’s defense had the upper hand almost every time. “If we had shot more, maybe something would have fallen there. We tried to play it all the time, but we didn’t succeed at all,” he explained, after which he got to the heart of the problem.
“We didn’t score a goal, so we couldn’t win,” said the 29-year-old defender. A logical statement against which nothing can be argued.
But the fact that Viktoria did not jump in the table to the juice from Letná cannot primarily be attributed to her lack of productivity. That would be disrespectful to Slovácko, which has developed an appetite after the shameful elimination from the MOL Cup at the ground of the third division Kroměříž (1:3).
“Slovacko was combative, excellent defensively. He deserves to be congratulated on his victory,” laughed Koubek, whose former charge, by the way, robbed him of points. One of the coaches of the team from Uherské Hradiště is former Pilsen stopper Jan Baránek, whom Koubek coached in the west of Bohemia in 2015.
“The guys did everything to the letter. The attacking trio worked brilliantly, as did the central players and defenders. That’s exactly the result we needed,” Baránka was pleased.
