After being demolished 5:0 in Almere by the Dutch U21 the young Lions today grabbed three points away to Gibraltar by wining 0:2.
photo by FFM: the Macedonian U21
Four days ago the Macedonian U21 coached by Dragi Kanatlarovski had an away game in the Netherlands and lost 5:0 and even wasn’t able to take a shot at the opponents goals. Today the team had the next game of the U21 European Championship qualifications and did better by winning 0:2 at Gibraltar.
There were three changes in the starting 11 as forward and captain Mario Ilievski was moved to the senior national team, while Hamza Ramani and Imran Fetai also now didn’t make the start. Marko Alchevski was on goal, captain Andrej Stojchevski, Stefan Despotovski and Gjorge Djekov were the CB’s, Reshat Ramadani and Ivan Nikolov played in DM, Behar Feta and Vane Krstevski started on the wings, Fisnik Isaki played in attacking midfield, whereas Fiton Ademi and Filip Trchevski were the forwards.
Macedonia had control of the game from the beginning and the hosts mainly tried to attack via counter attacks or long kicks from the goalkeeper or the defense. The slight domination lead to the opener in the 24th minute scored by Vane Krstevski who netted with a shout just from outside of the box after he received a pass by Fiton Ademi. In the 42nd minute Ademi scored from close range after an assist by Trpchevski.
Despite this win Macedonia is already not able to qualify for the EC, overall the results were to weak. The generation of players born in 2002 or later had definitely enough potential for better results, but coach Kanatlarovski wasn’t able to form a team that would have been able to perform better. Often it seemed that he had the wrong tactics and also some strange choices regarding the called up players.