Dynamo Kyiv v Dnipro Dipropetrovsk (18/04/10)

This was what I thought was a bonus game. On the Friday we should have gone home, but the volcano erupting in Iceland meant that we were stuck in Ukraine for what I thought was a couple of days. Little did I know!

Anyway, there weren't any eruptions off the pitch as first place took on third place (although at the time of writing it is now 2nd and 4th place) in front of a sell out crowd at Dynamo stadium. For some reason there seems to be some sort of friendship between the Dynamo and Dnipro fans and they finished each other's songs and sang songs about how much they liked each other, something I haven't seen since I was in Italy and even there it was a fairly rare experience.

On the pitch things weren't quite as friendly and most of the early play was dominated by Dnipro. However, Evhen Seleziynov, the former Shakhtar forward who spent a year on loan at Dynamo's city rivals Arsenal seems to have lost his scoring touch of late, although he remains one of my favourite players in the Ukrainian league. Nevertheless, the pressure paid off when Konoplyanka put Dnipro ahead on 18 minutes. This had the effect of spurring Dynamo into action, but they seemed to lack fire power without Shevchenko or Milevskiy being available for this game.

Things were to take a controversial turn again though and if there weren't any eruptions off the pitch there were plenty on it. On 25 minutes ex-Dynamo player Vitaliy Mandzyuk was sent off for bringing down the last man in a Dynamo attack. At the time I thought it was very close and wasn't convinced he brought down the last man and later when I saw the replays on TV it appeared that it should have been a yellow card rather than a red card. Obviously, this fanned the flames in the arguement that Dynamo have a special relationship with referees and obviously the Football Association moved quickly to deny it. You have to remember that the president of Dynamo and the president of the Football Association are brothers though.

Despite the one man advantage the game continued in the same vain as before with Dynamo dominating whilst never looking like scoring.

In the second half Dnipro seemed to decide that attack was the best form of defence, but it didn't work out for them as Magrao once again scored on 50 minutes. Dnipro continued to press though and didn't look ready to settle for a draw and managed to hit the bar and the post. Both of these shots came from free kicks that had obviously been worked out in training though and it has to be said that the Dnipro forwards tended to go down quite easily when they were in shooting range of goal.

The game continued to be quite open with both sides pushing for the win, but Ghioane, who is perhaps my all time fave Dynamo player was introduced and things gradually turned in Dynamo's favour, which isn't perhaps only due to Ghioane's introduction, but also the fact they had been playing for ages with a man less. Dynamo went on to hit the post twice, but on 70 minutes Ghioane scored a scrambled goal to make it 2-1 to Dynamo. Dynamo managed to shut up shop and play the game out.

Onr thing that remains a mystery is that when Serhiy Lazarenko was introduced by Dnipro is that they had a photo of him with hair on the scoreboard, was it really him or had they got the pictures mixed up?

The pictures here show a Dynamo clearance and a Dnipro attack.