Ukraine, frogs, and the World Cup

POTSDAM (Germany): Ukraine defender Vladislav Vashchuk is a World Cup footballer caught in a peculiar and strangely amphibian twilight zone. It is not the red card he received at his side's last match that bothers him. It is the invisible frogs.
 
"I have no idea where the frog story came from, all I can ask is 'why me?'" Vashchuk told DPA.
 
"Here I am at the World Cup, training, doing my job, trying to defend my country's honour, and then - boom - I'm the guy supposed to be hearing frogs," he said.
 
On Wednesday evening, shortly after Spain bombed Ukraine into near-oblivion during the sides' Group H opener, a peculiar news story surfaced.
 
Supposedly, the Ukrainians' awful performance had been due to lack of sleep, because frogs in a swamp near the Ukrainian team hotel had been croaking too loudly.
 
Vashchuk was booted out of the game in the 47th minute on a questionable last-man foul. He was also cited as the source of the frog excuse.
 
The report first surfaced only hours after the game with Spain ended on sports websites in Russia and Ukraine and in an international news agency. By the next day, the story of Vashchuk and the frogs was being reported around the world.
 
There was only one problem. "I never said anything like that, the last time I had talked with reporters was Monday, days before the game," Vashchuk explained.
 
"How could I complain about frogs if I never talked with any reporters?" Vashchuk, 31, asked, just a shade plaintively.
 
Vashchuk was never seen to violate the team's near-total ban on contact with media - a policy ultimately lifted by coach Oleg Blokhin on Friday.
 
Vashchuk pointed out that his room at the exclusive Seminaris hotel was several hundred metres from the nearest swamp, and so out of effective croaking distance.
 
The DPA reporter confirmed frogs were croaking away in the swamp but their enthusiastic love songs were not audible anywhere near Vashchuk's five-star accommodation.
 
Teammates stood solid with Vashchuk, dismissing frogs as to blame for Ukraine's embarrassing defeat to Spain. The player with the most experience with media, star striker Andrij Shevchenko, was also the most philosophical.
 
"Well, the frogs were completely invented of course," Shevchenko said.
 
"There have been a million things told about me. But of all those (false) stories, the idea that frogs somehow are keeping some one from sleeping - well that's really too much," he said.
 
"We lost because we failed to play to our level, and I include myself in that," he admitted.
 
Ukraine keeper Oleksander Shovkovsky expressed astonishment that a reporter could, allegedly, invent a story so obviously illogical.
 
"Of course journalists always have to have something to write about. But frogs?
 
"This is a World Cup football team. The idea that a World Cup player would blame frogs for our failure against Spain is ridiculous," the goalkeeper said.
 
"We lost the game because we made mistakes and the Spaniards played excellent football. Not because of frogs," Shovkovsky said.