Dynamo done by yellow peril

To listen to Mircea Lucescu, you’d think everything in Ukrainian football is stacked against him and his Shakhtar Donetsk side.

He complains persistently about scheduling and refereeing and managed even to find a way to blame the Ukrainian federation for the car crash he suffered before Christmas, from which he seems now happily recovered. Before Saturday’s vital game against Dynamo Kyiv, he raised objections about the referee, Yuriy Vaks.

It was Vaks, as Lucescu had feared, who proved the decisive figure, but he was decisive in favour of Shakhtar. Three minutes before half-time, with the score at 0-0, the Dynamo midfielder Denis Garmash, who had already been booked, went down in the Shakhtar box. He received treatment on the field and ran over towards the touchline to await the referee’s signal to return to the pitch. Vaks, though, ran over, his yellow card already out of his pocket, and with what might have been a grimace but looked unfortunately like a grin, showed it to Garmash, following up with a red.