As reported, the draw ceremony for the qualifying round of the 2023 European Championship to take place among the U-21 teams in Georgia and Romania was held today in Nyon, Switzerland. The head coach of the Azerbaijani U-21 national team Milan Obradovich evaluated the draw:
"I think Austria and Croatia are the strongest teams in the group. They perform successfully at the national team and U-21 levels. We can practically evaluate them as two teams with the same strength. Other teams in the group, Norway, Finland, Azerbaijan and Estonia, will compete for the third place. We played against Norway while working for the Serbian national team. It is a very good team tactically. They demonstrate fast, technical and quality football. It is difficult to comment on Finland and Estonia. Because I do not know their level of playing. But there have always been good players in Finland. We can express an opinion after detailed analysis. Some teams in our group can be stronger than us, but we are not afraid of any of them. In the last qualifying round, we showed that we could play our own game against teams such as France, Switzerland and Slovakia.
We can be better as a team. We just have to look ahead and be confident. We have to take risks for this. That is, we should not sit on the defense, we should attack by pressing as hard as we can. As in the game with France and Switzerland, we have to control the ball 50 percent. Shortly, we need to increase our strength compared to the previous qualifying round. If we increase our game tactically and technically, we can improve our points reserve and finish the group in a good place. If we can do that, it will be a step forward for us, and more players will go from the U-21 to the main team. It is neither easy nor difficult to do all this together. Because everything depends on us."
