the club before the season, and other important players receiving injuries. Other important players besides Starukhin at the time were Mykhaylo Sokolovsky, who went on to set a caps record for the club (for what he received the Club Loyalty Award in 1987), defenders Viktor Zvyahintsev and Valeriy Horbunov, who both made it numerous times to the 33 Top Players of the Soviet Championship lists, and goalkeeper Yuriy Dehteryov, who was named Soviet goalkeeper of the year and took third place for Soviet Footballer of the Year in 1977. Shakhtar twice, in 1980 and 1983, brought home the crystal USSR Cup to Donetsk and in 1983, it won the USSR Super Cup over then-domestic league champions Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk. Shakhtar reached the 1983–84 European Cup Winners' Cup quarter-final, and strikers Viktor Hrachov and Serhiy N. Morozov became joint top scorers of the tournament. In 1987, Shakhtar received the fewest yellow and red cards in the championship, for which the club was awarded the "Soviet Top League Fair Play Award" by Man and Law magazine. Between 1982 and 1988, Shakhtar received the "Together With The Club" award five times, an award given for good organization of home games and behaviour of the home fans. First decade in independent Ukraine – the beginning of the Akhmetov era In the newly independent Ukraine, Shakhtar, along with Dynamo Kyiv, became perennial first place competitors. In October 1995, a bombing-assassination took place at the team's stadium, killing club president Akhat Bragin. In 1996, Rinat Akhmetov took over as president and invested heavily in the club. Despite Shakhtar not being a strong contender for the championship at the time, finishing second many times with a large point gap from the first-place position, they won the Ukrainian Cup three times, in 1995 (under the management of former player Vladimir Salkov), 1997 and 2001. In the 1997–98 UEFA Cup Winners' Cup, Shakhtar were eliminated after a 5–2 aggregate loss to Vicenza, losing the first and second legs. Important players at the time were defenders Serhiy Popov and Mykhaylo Starostyak, goalkeeper Dmytro Shutkov, striker Oleh Matveyev (who was top scorer of the Premier League in the 1996–97 season), and midfielders Hennadiy Orbu, Valeriy Kriventsov and Ihor Petrov. Most of the players playing for the team of the time came through the team's youth ranks. Towards the end of the decade, the team finally started to look like a team able