Referee named for Villarreal—Zenit

UEFA has named the refereeing crew for Thursday’s match at the Ceramíca—he’s Artur Soares Dias from Portugal. He has never refereed a match involving the Yellow Submarine, but he has been the man in the middle for European matches involving five Spanish teams (four won by the La Liga side, one loss) and several of those also involved Russian teams. (Madrid 0-3 CSKA, Sevilla 2-1 Spartak, Lokomotiv 1-5 Atleti).

A reminder that the eight matches on Thursday fall into two time segments, and Valencia play at Krasnodar as one of the three early matches (Dinamo Kiev-Chelsea and Salzburg-Napoli being the others). At this point it looks as though those of us in the US will have to rely on Javi Mata’s radio call, Marca’s written minute-by-minute coverage, or something like that, because our match is one of two in the round not being broadcast here. (Arsenal—Rennes, naturally, is the featured one in our time slot).

I have not seen anything new about Alfonso Pedraza’s injury or whether he has trained with the team normally, but will update you if I see anything. Enjoy the afterglow of Sunday’s win for one more day! Endavant!!