Carlos Augusto wins it for ten-man Inter against Shakhtar
Inter beat Shakhtar Donetsk 1-0 at San Siro despite losing Alessandro Bastoni to a red card, extending Shakhtar's long scoreless run against them.
By Harvey Watkins,
Inter beat Shakhtar Donetsk 1-0 at San Siro on Wednesday night, and they did it the hard way. Alessandro Bastoni was sent off after 68 minutes for a second yellow card, and nine minutes later Carlos Augusto scored the only goal of the Champions League Matchday 3 fixture.
The sending-off and the winning goal
For more than two-thirds of the match the scoreline did not move. Then Bastoni was shown a second booking, and Inter were down to ten men with 22 minutes of normal time remaining. In a goalless game, that is usually the moment the balance tips towards the side with the extra player, and it would have been reasonable to expect Shakhtar to have the better of what followed.
Instead, the goal went the other way. Carlos Augusto scored in the 77th minute, and Inter held that lead to the end. The bare outline is striking enough on its own: the team reduced to ten men found a goal, and the team with eleven did not.
It was a narrow margin, and it would be wrong to read it as anything more comfortable than that. A single goal separated the sides, and on another night a dismissal with more than 20 minutes left might have cost Inter the points rather than leaving them as winners.
A familiar pattern in this fixture
What the result did do was continue a remarkable run in this meeting. Shakhtar have now played Inter six times since August 2020 and have not scored in any of those games.
- 17 Aug 2020: Inter 5-0 Shakhtar Donetsk
- 27 Oct 2020: Shakhtar Donetsk 0-0 Inter
- 9 Dec 2020: Inter 0-0 Shakhtar Donetsk
- 28 Sep 2021: Shakhtar Donetsk 0-0 Inter
- 24 Nov 2021: Inter 2-0 Shakhtar Donetsk
- 21 Oct 2026: Inter 1-0 Shakhtar Donetsk
Inter are unbeaten across those six matches, with four wins and three goalless draws. Yet the overall picture is of a tight fixture rather than a one-sided one. Inter have scored eight goals in the six games, and five of those came in a single match in August 2020. Strip that out and the other five meetings produced three goals between them.
This latest game sat squarely within that pattern. Low scoring, settled by one goal, and with Shakhtar again failing to find the net.
Reading the result
Some caution is due with the history. Almost five years passed between the November 2021 meeting and this one, so the head-to-head record describes the fixture rather than these particular sides. It is a pattern worth noting, not proof of anything about how the teams compare now.
The result itself is simpler to assess. Inter won at home on the third matchday of the competition, and they did so after losing a player with the score still level. Whatever else is said about the margin, a win secured from that position is not something to dismiss.
For Shakhtar, the frustration will be the familiar one in this fixture: another meeting with Inter, and another without a goal.