Hello again Sporting. It seems that things are going to be okay for our club. Before the pause for the international qualifications in Europe we managed to beat Lyubimets away with 2:0. Lyubimets is a new team from a city of 7 000 people and its their debut season in Bulgaria. They started quite well in the championship by beating the champions Ludogorets and Botev in Plovdiv. Currently they’re 5th. Anyway we beat them 2:0 with goals by Genkov and our best talent Vutov from a brilliant free kick which you can see in the video:
With this win we managed to climb up to the top half of the championship. This season they are 14 teams in total and after all the rounds are played the teams are split into 2 halfs - top 7 and bottom 7. We are currently 7th. :mrgreen: After the split play-offs are set to be played in order to determine the champion and the european competitors as well as the relegated teams. Something like in Belgium and the Netherlands if you follow. Since last year the last 4 teams gets relegated. The football union decided to reduce the number of teams step by step. The final version should contain 12 teams in total which will happen next season.
As I mentioned in the last post we released a few players including Portuguese Joao Silva who signed with Bari and Cristovao Ramos. Only Nuno Pinto remained in the squad and to be honest out of the 3 players he is the best and most persistent. It is expected that in the next week new players will arrive. Now the whole nation waits for the national team games against Italy in Friday and Malta next week. If we manage somehow to get 4 points from these games the road to the World Cup is open for us. We haven’t qualified for a World Cup since 1998… Bojinov of course is not in the squad. :mrgreen: Do you still have him in your team? There were news here in Bulgaria that you were about to fire him for training with another team during the summer while having a contract with Sporting? :
Yes, it’s true that Sporting fired him for that reason, but his agent refuses that decision and probably the case will be solved by FIFA.
Unfortunately you lost against Italy but you only depend on you to take the second place and qualify to Playoff’s. There is still an open window for Bulgaria!
Good luck to Levski this weekend against Chermonorets, I really simpathyze with your club because a few years ago I met a bulgarian who lives here in Portugal and we became good friends. He is a Levski’s passionate supporter. :great:
I guess you already know… We are not mainly against the new coach but its a form of a protest against the club management and the decisions that were made lately. So far for the year 2013 we have changed 5 coaches with Slavisa Jokanovic being the last one before Petev. When Joka was appointed in July the club management assured that they will leave him to work until New Year at least and rebuild the squad. Start fresh but that didnt happened. No new players were bought and of course the results were extremely poor and Joka was released. Although we have 2 lost games in total with him and the fans were supporting him. There were some slight improvement mainly in the defence play but to re-build a whole squad requires time. Which Jokanovic didnt receive from the board.
Today’s riots on the press conference resulted the resignation of 2 of our technical directors (in total we have a lot and everyone is doing basically nothing for the club). The club president threatened that he will might leave as well but I strongly dont believe that will happen… So at this point there is no one to trust in the club except for two people - Hristo Yovov who is also some kind of a sports director (ex-player who retired last season) and Elin Topuzakov another ex-player and a great icon of our club who is currently an assistant manager and is leading the trainings with the players while all this crap is fixed… And all this happens just 10 days before the derby against cska. Just lovely. :-[
Well after just 1 day Petev left. Now our official coach is Elin Topuzakov who I mentioned in my previous post. It seems that he will take in charge of the team until New Year at least. After that we will be looking for new manager. Currently we are passing through hell and after the break for the national teams we have games with cska, Botev and Lokomotiv Plovdiv… Basically we are fucked and all this happens months before our 100th anniversary… I see that at least you guys are doing okay footbally speaking. Good job. :great:
Today one of the few positive events in our club occurred. We presented our official logo for the 100-year anniversary. To be honest I expected this to end in a fail but I was wrong.
Feliz ano novo, Sporting. I hope 2014 will be a lot better than last year…
Today was the first training of the squad. Things at the club are not going well. We are having financial problems and we’re desperate to find new sponsors. Before Christmas our “beloved” president decided to sell Garry Rodrigues to Ludogorets (main rivals in the championship). However the fans reacted negatively and organized a meeting with him. He then cancelled the deal and now Rodrigues is about to be sold to West Ham since we are in big need of money. We already sold our best talent Antonio Vutov to Udinese and got some cash which will probably go for paying debts and building our stadium. Yeap, we started building the main stand of the stadium and at some point the construction stopped due to lack of finances. Just lovely. :-[ Our new signings would probably be low-profile players and a few youngsters from the academy. Plus Valeri Bojinov. :mrgreen: At least the press is issuing that we are going to sign him but as I said we dont have much money and we will count mainly on youngsters and whats left. This will be a very sad 100th year anniversary. ???
At least I see you are doing well in the league. Wish you good luck. Cheers.
I was watching Ludogorets game against Lazio and it was surprise after surprise.
First surprise, it was played in the national stadium
Second surprise, the stadium was full (who the hell supports them in Sofia?)
Third surprise, some Levski supporters joined the Italians
Fourth surprise, 4 goals were miserable GK failures and 2 were defensive bloopers (lol)
Fifth surprise, I went back watching the first game’s recap and Lazio only had 8000 home fans in Rome!
Sixth surprise, back then both teams had one player sente off and both missed one penalty each!!
What the hell!! Nothing made sense here! lol… and two words crossed my mind: “Game Fixing”?
No match fixing, just poor Lazio. Besides that Ludogorets were preparing for that game the whole winter pause. So as follows:
It was played on the National stadium because its the only stadium in the country that has the license to host that kind of game :-[
Nobody supports them in Sofia but there are several factors that made the attendance so high - both Sofia clubs are in a bad condition. People wants to see something glorious and they support the strongest of the day (I hope you get that) and also the Media did a good job in making Ludogorets like the National cause that every Bulgarian should support… I personally didnt went to that game but I know fans both of Levski and cska that went to the stadium… I almost killed myself while arguing with those people. Few days later the National team had a friendly game against Belarus at the same stadium and only 400-500 people went.
Some Levski ultra groups are friends with Lazio since 1999-2000. We got a lot of critics for that and we were called traitors because we gave up on the “national cause” and we were anti-Bulgarians as well. Again the media did a great job on that conveniently skipping the fact that the starting 11 of Ludogorets against Lazio had 3 or 4 Bulgarians in total.
and 6. - poor skills from Lazio players… Today they lost at home from Atalanta so there is nothing surprising.
I dont think we have enough money for Benfica… Benfica is one of many options to play with but I dont think we will organise it. I was told from the inside that Ajax have almost accepted to visit us for the anniversary but nothing official yet. Besides we have bigger problems than that. I dont know if you watch Breaking Bad but this year we are making our own version. Things are getting worse and worse every single day. Yesterday we lost the derby against cska for the 2nd time in a season… This never happened in the last 27 years… We finished 6th and now playoffs are set to be played and the first one is… against cska. :mrgreen: Before the derby we had 2 other derbies with the other 2 Sofia teams - Lokomotiv and Slavia. We won 1 point in total from those games… Our beloved president decided to fire our Sports Director Hristo Yovov (club icon) and removed one of the assistant coaches, yes not the head coach but the ASSISTANT Marian Hristov (also a favourite player by the fans). Its useless to say that our style of play is just a pain to watch… Its something like that or even worse:
Actually that is a good game where one needs skills :mrgreen:
Well, I think it’s both treason to support either Ludogorets or Lazio. But the biggest traitor of all was Vezalov, no one can convince me of his innocence. I have a friend playing in the Bulgarian league (can’t disclose who) and I was told that the game against Slavia was suspicious. A goal that changed history.
I’ve been in Sophia last November for a week, and I got a ride to your stadium, unfortunately I couldn’t see the inside. A guy of the restaurant told me if i wanted to see, I should buy the ticket for the next match (22 November) ???. A bulgarian friend told me the story of Vasil Levski, great man! I was impressed by Sophia, very good food (I’m fan), very cultural city, nice people, and too many lion statues! I’ll be back!
We usually dont do that - tours on the stadium. We are far away from European club’s professionalism and marketing. :-[ On 22 November was probably our best match in the season so far - 4:1 against Litex I am sorry you missed it. However you hit the jackpot with the beers - Shumensko and Pirinsko are my favourites. :great:
As for Vezalov’s own goal I dont want to believe there was anything suspicious in that game. In that game we hit 3 times the bar and had many chances but at the end we fucked ourselves up. Here we say “whatever you do on yourself no one else can” and this season is getting ever worse, its just a nightmare that on our 100th anniversary we are on 6th place with no chance of winning anything… Well, we still have the Cup going but we play against Botev Plovdiv and the first game is in Wednesday…
It seems that things are going to be okay for our club. Before the pause for the international qualifications in Europe we managed to beat Lyubimets away with 2:0. Lyubimets is a new team from a city of 7 000 people and its their debut season in Bulgaria. They started quite well in the championship by beating the champions Ludogorets and Botev in Plovdiv. Currently they’re 5th. Anyway we beat them 2:0 with goals by Genkov and our best talent Vutov from a brilliant free kick which you can see in the video:
