Scotland discover that the Nations League is good, actually, after win over Ukraine - The Warm-Up

THURSDAY'S BIG STORIES When Two Become One Ad We tuned into Scotland against Ukraine partly in the hope that we'd see a good game, but mostly because there wasn't anything else on. What we were not expecting, though, was a philosophical conundrum. UEFA Nations LeagueDykes nets late double as Scotland beat Ukraine to go top of group14 HOURS AGO But then, just before half-time, Che Adams threatened to burst beyond Ukraine's defence, and Valeriy Bondar hurled himself into Adams's chest.

Over came the referee, and out came the yellow card. It shouldn't have been controversial: there were covering defenders, which meant it couldn't be a straight red for denying a goalscoring opportunity, and by the Warm-Up amateurish guess the tackle, though staggering clumsy and frankly a little bit weird, fell just on the yellow side of punishment. An orange-ish yellow, maybe.

Verging on the terracotta. The thing about yellow card offences, though, is that two of them are supposed to add up to one red. If Bondar had spread his offences out over two separate incidents — merely tripped Adams here, say, then five minutes later thrown himself bodily through the chest of John McGinn — then he'd have been in trouble.

As it is, he appears to have found a loophole in football's laws: you can commit two bookable offences and stay on the pitch, as long as they're both contained in a single offence. Something similar probably saved Kieran Trippier against Manchester City: that sense that an offence, though it may feel deserving of a red card in total, doesn't quite get over any of the particular tests. We're calling for the officials to reconsider this double jeopardy paradox: not out of any sense of justice or fair play, but because we'd like to see