UEFA Cup holders Shakhtar Donetsk thrashed Club Bruges 4-1 away on Thursday when top-level soccer began experimenting with five-man refereeing teams in the opening Europa League group stage games.
Midfielders Oleksiy Gai, Willian and Darijo Srna put the Ukrainians 3-0 up at halftime in one of 24 matches played with additional assistant referees (AAR) beside each goal to spot fouls and dives in the box.
Karel Geraerts pulled one back for the home side just past the hour before Konstantyn Kravchenko’s goal wrapped up an emphatic Group J win for Shakhtar in the remodelled UEFA Cup.
If the experiment with AARs is successful they are likely to be introduced into the game at large within a season or two.
Basel enjoyed a surprise 2-0 win over visiting AS Roma to spoil coach Claudio Ranieri’s first European match since he replaced Luciano Spalletti two weeks ago after their poor start in Serie A.
Winger Carlitos capitalized on a defensive mix-up early in the Group E match and Federico Almerares struck three minutes from time to wrap up victory for the Swiss.
“It was an ugly defeat,” former Juventus and Chelsea boss Ranieri told Mediaset television.
“We were not very solid and I saw too few touches of the ball. We have to try to be less beautiful but more concrete. The lads have to learn to react and concentrate for 90 minutes,” he said.
Galatasaray, the 2000 UEFA Cup winners, got off to a flying start in Group F thanks to a 3-1 win over Panathinaikos in Athens, with the Turkish club’s coach Frank Rijkaard getting the better of Henk Ten Cate, once his assistant at Barcelona.
Panathinaikos’ city rivals AEK Athens went down heavily too, losing 4-0 at Everton in Group I.
Defenders Joseph Yobo and Sylvain Distin got the final touch to corners and Steven Pienaar drove home from 25m before Jo sealed the win for the English outfit with a simple finish.
Four times European champions Ajax were held to a goalless draw in Amsterdam by Romania’s FC Timisoara in Group A.
Celtic, who have also been European champions, paid the price for sitting on the first-half lead Greek striker Georgios Samaras earned them at Hapoel Tel Aviv in Group C.
Serbian midfielder Nemanja Vucicevic and forward Maaran Lala found the net in the last 15 minutes to earn the Israelis a 2-1 win after Samaras had to come off in the second half having hurt himself falling into one of the dugouts.
Hamburg SV’s hopes of reaching the final at their home stadium in May were dented when they were thrashed 3-0 at Rapid Vienna in the other match in the group.
Athletic Bilbao thumped Austria Vienna 3-0 and last year’s UEFA Cup finalists Werder Bremen won 3-2 at Nacional Madeira in Group L.
Roma’s city rivals Lazio handed a 2-1 victory to Salzburg in Group G through a pair of terrible defensive muddles late on after spurning a series of good chances when 1-0 up.
Genoa prevented it from being a washout for Italian clubs by beating Czechs Slavia Prague 2-0 in Group B.
North Korea’s FIFA Under-17 Women’s World Cup-winning team on Saturday received a heroes’ welcome back in the capital, Pyongyang, with hundreds of people on the streets to celebrate their success. They had defeated Spain on penalties after a 1-1 draw in the U17 World Cup final in the Dominican Republic on Nov. 3. It was the second global title in two months for secretive North Korea — largely closed off to the outside world; they also lifted the FIFA U20 Women’s World Cup in September. Officials and players’ families gathered at Pyongyang International Airport to wave flowers and North Korea flags as the
Taiwan’s top table tennis player Lin Yun-ju made his debut in the US professional table tennis scene by taking on a new role as a team’s co-owner. On Wednesday, Major League Table Tennis (MLTT), founded in September last year, announced on its official Web site that Lin had become part of the ownership group of the Princeton Revolution, one of the league’s eight teams. MLTT chief executive officer Flint Lane described Lin’s investment as “another great milestone for table tennis in America,” saying that the league’s “commitment to growth and innovation is drawing attention from the best in the sport, and we’re
Coco Gauff of the US on Friday defeated top-ranked Aryna Sabalenka 7-6 (7/4), 6-3 to set up a showdown with Olympic champion Zheng Qinwen in the final of the WTA Finals, while in the doubles, Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching was eliminated. Gauff generated six break points to Belarusian Sabalenka’s four and built on early momentum in the opening set’s tiebreak that she carried through to the second set. She is the youngest player at 20 to make the final at the WTA Finals since Denmark’s Caroline Wozniacki in 2010. Zheng earlier defeated Wimbledon champion Barbora Krejcikova of the Czech Republic 6-3, 7-5 to book
For King Faisal, a 20-year-old winger from Ghana, the invitation to move to Brazil to play soccer “was a dream.” “I believed when I came here, it would help me change the life of my family and many other people,” he said in Sao Paulo. For the past year and a half, he has been playing on the under-20s squad for Sao Paulo FC, one of South America’s most prominent clubs. He and a small number of other Africans are tearing across pitches in a country known as the biggest producer and exporter of soccer stars in the world, from Pele to Neymar. For
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