The Lithuanian national team experienced another fiasco on Saturday - in the match they lost 0-1 to Estonia, and after these matches, criticism was once again poured on the footballers and the LFF.
One of the critics - designer Aleksandras Pogrebnojus, on his Facebook profile, published an ironically altered LFF logo and mocked the project "Let's Grow Ronaldo for Lithuania".
A. Pogrebnojus agreed to briefly share his thoughts with the portal Eurofootball.com
What do you think is the real essence of the project "Let's Grow Ronaldo for Lithuania"? Is LFF simply trying to simulate effectiveness during a period of intense criticism?
I generally think that the Ronaldo name itself is strange, to grow exactly such... This is a campaign where I feel it is intended to cover up some activity. Why grow one Ronaldo, do you need to grow ten, I don't really understand. Maybe they really want something good, but I somehow don't see that anything good would come out of it.
Reading the descriptions of "Let's Grow Ronaldo for Lithuania" can give the impression that the main problem of Lithuanian football is the lack of training conditions for youth. However, is the real problem actually here, or perhaps the roots of the problems are much deeper?
I remember that in my time there weren't those conditions either, when we were 13-14 years old we would play somewhere in the fields, we would make our own pitch and play. But maybe we didn't have computers or anything else.
I think everything else is structured everywhere. Everything depends on mass, after all, about 100 children come to that football school, and in the end there are 10 left, it has always been like that. There is nothing to invent here. In Germany, England, France or Italy everything is already found. How to prepare everything and do everything so that children want to play football.
Grow Ronaldo? Isn't Valančiūnas better then? What will parents think, imagine, I am a father, and I see Lithuania losing to Estonians. Who will want to send their children to a football school to get their legs broken? It's better to take them to tennis, swimming, where there are examples. First of all, you need to show an example.
Where should the revival of Lithuanian football start? By cutting off the head, i.e. Julius Kvedaras, or should it start from lower levels of the federation, coaches, etc.?
Everything starts with the president, in every country. The dictator is overthrown, then democracy and so on.
What is the head of the football federation? He is a manager, he is a strategist of everything. And he gathers that team. I think some man from business or the like could come. He wouldn't have to be a football coach. There are plenty of football coaches and other specialists around him. You don't need to lead the defense ministry to be a soldier.
But there are people from football who can, the best example is Šemberas. They don't take him to the national team, maybe he will be president.
Although I watched the Italian match against Bulgaria yesterday, and the Italians have many good football players, but for some reason they play Pirlo, and Buffon, but in Lithuania no one takes Stankevičius and Šemberas to the national team.
We saw a few protest banners at the match against Switzerland, and the tragic match against Estonia again provoked a lot of reactions on social networks, etc. What else can journalists, prominent people or just ordinary football fans do to make J. Kvedaras resign? And is it even possible?
I think the public's reaction must be there, but first of all we must think not us, not designers or musicians, but those people who have weight in football itself.
If he (J. Kvedaras - author) doesn't resign, there will be other elections, next year. However, until then we must not spoil the next World Cup qualification. Now I think the coach should resign (Igor Pankratjevas - author), he has nowhere to go, and in the next matches the game for the World Cup qualification should be modeled, as we have lost everything in this cycle.
The Estonians are already in third place in the group, if they win against the Slovenes, they will qualify, and the Lithuanians can now win whatever they want. I think that the match against San Marino will show everything, it will be 1-0, everyone will be happy again.
There is no need to make a laughingstock of a popular sport in the world. But now it's already impossible to survive, we just have to laugh.
