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Dnipro rue missing 'once-in-a-lifetime opportunity'

If FC Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk captain Ruslan Rotan was upbeat despite the defeat by Sevilla FC, Yevhen Seleznyov rued losing “the most important match of our lives”.
Yevhen Seleznyov, Dnipro forward
It hurts a lot. When you get to a final, you’re thinking only of victory. Then you lose, and regardless of what you’ve done before that, you’ve still lost and it hurts. I gave [my runners-up medal] to my son and said these words: “Remember this: only accept the winners’ medal, don’t ever be happy with runners-up medals.”
We got to the final, we did unbelievable things and beat some top teams [this season]. But when you get to the final and you lose, what’s the point? Everything was good, everything was excellent, everything was wonderful … we got to Warsaw [to compete] for such a prestigious trophy. We had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that not everyone has, and we lost. We lost the most important match of our lives.
It’s not a tragedy, but it’s emotionally overwhelming. I don’t know what to say, it’s really tough to talk about right now.
Ruslan Rotan, Dnipro captain
It’s hard to say what we lacked tonight, but we can put this season down as a success. We didn’t win the trophy, we were close to it, but our opponents took advantage of our mistakes and we made more than Sevilla. They are strong; they have just won the Europa League for the second time in a row. They didn’t let us play the game that we wanted.
At times, our problem was that we retreated too close to our goal. We scored, and then retreated and conceded twice. After that we levelled the game, grabbed the initiative and equalised. The second half was end to end, but Sevilla took advantage of our mistake. At the end we had no strength left .
Credit: uefa
 

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