Foreshadow: Veszprém – Vardar

 

Telekom Veszprém will play on home court against on Saturday at 17:30 in the VELUX EHF Champions League. This time, the opponent is going to be the same as in the last CL Final, HC Vardar. The game will be broadcasted live by Sport 1.

 

 

As it is still vivid in everyone’s mind, our last encounter against Vardar was when Veszprém played their fourth Champions League final, and from the final victory, our next opponent held us back. Vardar had a six goals lead in the first half, which melted to five by the half time. Our team came back to only one goal, and from that, both parties went head-to-head. Unfortunately, we could not manage to win and lost the final by three goals, 27:24. Our top scorer was Kentin Mahé, who scored six goals out of six penalties.

 

Vardar did really well in Group B of the Champions League until the latest round. They managed to beat in Montpellier 31:33, Porto 32:27 and Motor Zaporozhye 30:31 in the first three rounds. Then came the fourth round, in which they suffered a serious, 20:31 loss by THW Kiel and after which, their head coach, David Pisonero has been fired. The top scorer of the North-Macedonians is Timur Dibirov with 25 goals.

 

 

They are on second spot in the SEHA League, and just in the Champions League, they have three victories and a loss. They beat Beijing University, then lost to Motor Zaporozhye 32:31. After the slight bump in the road, they did themselves justice by winning two in a row against Nexe and Presov. Timur Dibirov is the top scorer of the team in the SEHA League as well, here he scored 20 times so far.

 

Many great players left Vardar over the summer, such as Igor Karacic, Dejan Milovaljev, Rogerio Moraes or Vuko Borozan. Besides them, Janja Vojvodic, Marko Mishevski, Dmitrii Kiselev, Martin Popovski also left club, while Vlado Nedanovski retired. To their places came Dimitar Dimitrioski from Metalurg, Sergey Gorpishin from Erlangen, Pavel Atman from Hannover, Arturs Kugis from Grosswallstadt, Domen Sikosek from Bruck and José Guilherme De Toledo from Wisla Plock.

 

Telekom Veszprém played in the K&H League this week, where they beat Gyöngyös by seven goals, 34:27. In their last Champions League game, the “Építők” clinched a huge victory over the Portuguese champions FC Porto Sofarma, 38:28.

 

Let’s go Veszprém!

 

 

Photo: Dávid Vörös