Inter-Porto, the referee will be Jovanovic: the statistics

Srdjan Jovanovic will be the Inter-Porto referee: the nominations for the second leg of the round of 16 first leg of the Champions League are in fact official and the Serbian whistle was matched to Wednesday night’s match at the Giuseppe Meazza stadium in Milan. For the Nerazzurri, this is the first meeting with the 36-year-old from Belgrade, while the latter has managed the Portuguese only once in the Youth League, in 2018. The assistants will be compatriots Uros Stojkovic and Milan Mihajlovic, fourth official Novak Simovic. In the Var room there will be the German Bastian Dankert, assisted by Marco Fritz.

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If in that Chelsea-Porto (goalkeeper Diogo Costa) the English won 3-2 in extra time to go to the Youth League final, Jovanovic’s precedents with the Italians are of various flavors, recently not very sweet. This year the Serbian managed Benfica-4-3 Juventus by whistling a penalty for the Lisbon team, but previously he had been the referee of Salzburg-1-1 Milan on the first day of the group stage. Both teams have two more precedents with the 36-year-old: in 2018 a 0-1 draw in Luxembourg against Dudelange for the Rossoneri, in 2021 a terrible 4-0 with Chelsea against the Bianconeri. However, some Azzurri from Inter have already known him for two encounters in the Nations League: the 1-1 draw between Italy and Germany last June and the 2-1 win over Belgium in the final for third place the previous year. Perhaps Nicolò Barella will remember him with pleasure: in the 2019 Under-21 European Championship it was he who whistled after the 1-0 goal against Belgium in the group stage, also Alessandro Bastoni and Federico Dimarco were on the field. Francesco Acerbi was instead the starter in 2019 in a 2-0 Rennes-Lazio Europa League draw, while Henrikh Mkhitaryan recalls the 3-0 win against Trabzonspor in the Conference League qualifiers, which he then won in May 2022.