Mircea Lucescu:

We knew it’d be extremely difficult to turn our attention from the Champions League to the domestic championship. I am talking about the difference in the motivation, ambitions. It’s absolutely different level. We knew that we had to be as much motivated for the match as our opponents, Karpaty. Karpaty had had the entire week to prepare themselves for this fixture. And in the first half we could see how well they were prepared: we faced a well-organised team, a very aggressive team that was moving around a lot. This is why we lost many individual duels in the first half.
I had a hard talk with my players before the second half. We had to change our tactics and fielded two forwards. We also had to start playing long-ball football which helped us create a number of scoring opportunities. In the first half it was taking us too long to switch from defence to attack because our two central defenders couldn’t provide with effective assistance our midfielders and the striker.
Unfortunately we could witness lack of concentration in front of Karpaty’s goal. It was a shame not to score from point-black range. One’s got to have talent to miss the target from some inches. Such players should remain on the bench. Such blunders can’t be forgiven. It reminded my the beginning of the season when we could waste lots of opportunities.
And I can’t complain about performance in the second half.
In fact, the score could have been 5-0.

Could you sum up the first half of the season?

We deserve to be on a higher position in the league table since none of the teams we had played in the first half of the season was performing on a higher level. Unfortunately, those silly mistakes we were doing had made us drop points. I think we were too much relaxed after the triumph of the previous season and we were punished for that. Then we had to reconsider our attitude towards the situation. We realised that we had no right to leave the Donetsk without the Champions League.        
But the season is far from being over, there is our final battle at Barcelona. The team have to play that match on a decent level to prove that we deserve playing in Europe. We shall try to take revenge on Barcelona for the defeat we suffered from them in Donetsk.

Have you planned to play any friendly matches before going to Barcelona?

No, there won’t be any friendlies. There will be two days off. Then we shall have two trainings on Thursday and we shall start preparing for the match. Maybe we shall depart on Saturday to see the match between Valencia and Barcelona.
We shall be trying to do our best in Spain; we are taking this match very seriously. I hope Chygrynskyy, Duljaj and Kucher shall recover by the Matchday.