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Post by Deleted on Jun 25, 2017 16:23:57 GMT
Trepca ‘89: The first Kosovar club in the Champions LeagueIt was a freezing March day in Gjilan, eastern Kosovo, when Trepca ‘89 came to the diminutive Agim Ramadani Stadium in the town’s retail district, looking furtively over their shoulders at the relegation zone.The last time they had been in Gjilan, in late September to play FK Drita, they had taken a 1-1 draw that kept them top of the early season Super League table. But the winter had been a bitter one, and as Kosovo succumbed to the cold so too did Trepca, winning three of their next 14 games and slumping down the table with a deferential compliance. By early spring the dotted line near the foot of the league, that great common denominator at all levels of the game, was just a few defeats from catching them. That day at the Agim Ramadani, a Brutalist kind of place that is not so much a stadium as two long banks of concrete staring blankly back at each other across a football pitch, it was hard to imagine how the atmosphere could have been made more doleful. Trepca won the game against FK Gjilani 1-0 thanks to an ungainly first-half goal that bounced in off the stricken goalkeeper as he tried to anticipate forward Fiton Hajdari’s low strike. There were no away fans in the ground, at least none that bothered to register their allegiance in the form of vocal support. The camera operator, sent by the national broadcaster RTV21, erected his tripod maybe 15 feet along from where I was sitting on the bare stone terrace. Over 90 minutes, the feeling drained, first from my extremities, then from my heart. This was top-flight football played without flair, without energy, seemingly without hope. Kosovo were still outside of the European football family then, though the historic vote that would welcome them into UEFA was only a few weeks away. Nothing was being taken for granted, and the anticipation was muted, largely out of fear that the poll might yet not yield a favourable result. Football in Kosovo still looked and felt very, very amateur. Skip ahead to June 2017 and, by virtue of winning the Super League in its first UEFA-recognized season, Trepca have become the first Kosovar club to qualify for the Champions League, entering albeit at the first of four preliminary rounds. That process will begin at the end of June, giving the side from the northern province of Mitrovica scarcely the time to catch their breath and reflect on a historic season. But no one is complaining; this is what Trepca wanted. It’s what Kosovo crave. Source: thesetpieces.com
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Post by rugbytoffee on Jun 26, 2017 15:05:46 GMT
Blimey!
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