Despite the coronavirus pandemic, matchday 5 of the Belarus Premier League took place on Saturday, involving the country’s most prominent teams.
Surprisingly, reigning champions Dynamo Brest, and eternal champions BATE Borisov, both suffered a remarkably lousy day.
This fact contributed to the general trend in the only active league in Europe: the ‘outsiders’ clubs are taking the lead early on the season.
While they knew that Slutsk conquered the league’s pole position last night with 10 points, Dynamo Brest, BATE and Torpedo Zhodino, all have aimed to chase the surprising black horses and get back to their natural positions at the highest ranks of the table. It didn’t go as planned.
Vitebsk v Dynamo Brest
Dynamo Brest played Vitebsk away, and what was supposed to be an easy game turned out to be a nightmare.
Brest couldn’t take control over the game, and although they held the ball more, they struggled to threaten the goal. Even worse, Brest lost their heads. With two yellow cards in the first half and an additional three, plus two red cards in the second, Brest found themselves in 9 players late in the game. The second red card came from a foul within the box by Yevhen Khacheridi, the Ukrainian centre back, who caused a penalty.
Ion Nicolaescu, Vitebsk’s young Moldovan talent, has notched in the penalty and guaranteed that there will be no easy games this season in Belarus. Vitebsk won 1-0, went to second place and kept Dynamo Brest deep in the 10th spot after five matches.
BATE Borisov v Torpedo Zhodino
In the later game BATE Borisov, the team who has ruled football in Belarus for almost two complete decades, needed to win against one of the refreshing teams in the league - Torpedo BelAZ Zhodino.
BATE, who has lost the title last season, seems to be unstable again. A missed penalty by Pavel Nekhajchik, just before the halftime whistle, demonstrated this perfectly. BATE’s form, in such an important match, a month into the season, is not good. Zhodino themselves did not come to play much football and was mainly focused on defence, or more precisely: fouls.
21 of these, including 3 yellow cards, was the main statistic row for the orange team, who simply came to grab a point from the former giants, and run away. It worked.
The match ended in 0-0, what left BATE in the middle of the table, and sent Zhodino to the third place, with the exact same points like Slutsk and Vitebsk.
Other results:
Isloch vs Slavia Mozyr 2-1
Ruh Brest vs FC Minsk 1-0
Tajikistan Higher League:
Dushanbe-83 vs Faizkand 0-0
FC Regar TadAZ vs Istaravshan 4-1