The Metalist Herald
Boardroom28 Jul 2031
Metalist counting the cost
The accounts make uncomfortable reading. Wages first and ambition second is the order of business at Metalist now.
Player ratings28 Jul 2031
Age has not caught Vavá Guerreiro yet — 8.77
At 33 he is supposed to be managing his minutes. Instead he was marked 8.77 and looked, for ninety minutes, exactly like the player everybody remembers.
Squad28 Jul 2031
Maksym Zaderaka in a row with a teammate
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Metalist this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad28 Jul 2031
Danylo Makarenko is a better footballer than he was
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 19 he is doing things at this level he could not do at the start of the season, and the coaching staff will tell you exactly which of them.
Boardroom28 Jul 2031
Graduation day at Metalist
9 boys move up, and somewhere in the building the people who coached them at twelve are quietly having the best morning of their working year. Nothing about this shows up in a result and it is why the academy exists.
Squad28 Jul 2031
Yehor Abramov has improved at 25, which nobody expected
Careers are supposed to plateau and then decline, and the players who ignore that are always the ones who were listening on the training ground. 3 points of it, over months, at an age where the direction normally only goes one way.
Squad28 Jul 2031
Words at Metalist training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Yevhenii Isaienko is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
Match26 Jul 2031
Metalist get the job done against Feniks
A 2‑0 win over Feniks, earned rather than given, and the sort of afternoon that sends everyone home talking about next week instead of this one.
Player ratings28 Jul 2031
Santiago Ponce De León runs at them all day
Successful dribbles: 19. There is a particular sort of despair on a full-back's face by the seventieth minute, and it was on display.
In brief
- Market One of our own: Andriy Zinchenko joins the Metalist first team
- Market Viktor Tymchyk steps up from the Metalist academy
- Market Kostiantyn Lunyov steps up from the Metalist academy