After yesterday's Champions League group stage game between Shakhtar and Antwerp, Belgian head coach Mark Van Bommel expressed his dissatisfaction with the work of the Polish refereeing team headed by Bartosz Frankowski.
Miroslav Stupar, a well-known referee in the past, assessed the refereeing decisions in yesterday's clash in Hamburg:
- The referee was loyal to both teams and, in my opinion, his decisions did not affect the result. Although in a few episodes he could have been stricter. Therefore, Van Bommel's censures are unfounded. Unfortunately, there are enough head coaches who justify the unsuccessful game of their charges by fictitious bias of referees. Frankovskiy had no objective reasons to award Shakhtar a penalty or penalise Taras Stepanenko with a yellow card for elbowing him. There were no such episodes in Hamburg as in the penalty shoot-out of the recent match between Ukraine and Italy, when referee Manzano from Spain did not want to notice a 100 per cent infringement of the rules at the Scuadra Adzurra goal," Stupar said.