Shakhtar Donetsk’s Ukraine international Aleksandr Kucher will go into the first game of the World Cup 2010 playoffs against Greece as Ukraine’s best player in the FTBL ranking, irrespective of position. The fact that he ranks ahead of even strikers is an achievement in itself, but his score of 89.35 points also puts him in 24th place in our world ranking of defenders. For a player in a Category 2 league, that is quite a feat.

Yet Kucher is more likely than not to incur losses in the two games against the Greeks: for him to advance Ukraine will have to win the two games without conceding a single goal, which is rather remote as a possibility.

But even if Kuchera loses the top spot in our ranking of Ukrainian players, he is guaranteed to remain firmly in the lead among Ukrainian defenders: his immediate rival, Barcelona’s Dmytro Chigrinskiy, trails by more than 20 rating points.