2024-07-12 21:15:04
The Slovenian “Maribor” no victory over Bulgarian team in UEFA tournaments
“Botev” (SW) should continue its march in Europe, judging by history. Plovdiv won 2:1 over “Maribor” at their “Hristo Botev” stadium in the first match of round I of the Europa League. The match was played in front of exactly 15,387 supporters.
One of the new additions to the Bulgarian team – Anthony Udzha, who has over 100 matches in the Bundesliga, opened at the very beginning. However, the joy of the people of Plovdiv lasted too little – Pius Shirvis equalized 10 minutes later. The success of “Botev” was brought by Nikola Iliev, who returned a year ago from the “Inter” academy.
In this way, the stadium of Plovdiv remains impregnable – the winner of the Bulgarian cup has never lost a match in Europe at its club stadium.
“Maribor”, which is led by the former coach of “Ludogorets” Ante Shimunja, will have to rewrite its own history if it wants to continue in the second most powerful UEFA tournament. In 5 matches against a Bulgarian opponent, the team has no victory over our representative in the Europa League.
So far, the team from Slovenia has only eliminated a home team once. This happened in 2016. Then “Maribor” removed “Levski”, but after 2 draws – 0:0 in Slovenia and 1:1 in Sofia. However, the away goal rule still applied at the time. In 2019, “Maribor” again failed to beat the regular participant in Europe, “Ludogorets”. The hegemon and the team from the former Yugoslav Republic met in the play-off to enter the group stage of the second-ranked tournament. After 2:2 in Slovenia and 0:0 in Bulgaria, “Maribor” was eliminated.
The rematch between the people of Plovdiv and the team led by Shimunja is on Thursday at 9:15 p.m. And the Slovenians must necessarily win if they want to play at least 2 more matches in the Europa League.
If the winner of the Bulgarian cup goes ahead, the opponent in the next phase will be the Greek giant “Panathinaikos”. In the event that “Botev” drops out of the Europa League, the team continues to the second round of the newest tournament under the auspices of UEFA – the Conference League. The opponent there will be “Universitatia” (Craiova) from Romania.
Otherwise, the success for the people of Plovdiv was the first for the team in Europe at the “Hristo Botev” stadium after a 29-year wait. “Botev” last played at the “College”, as the facility is called, in the European tournaments on September 26, 1995, when in a match from the now defunct UEFA Cup tournament, it drew 1:1 with the Spanish “Seville”. After that, for many years the club from Plovdiv failed to qualify for the European tournaments. And later their stadium was demolished and when they won a quota for a UEFA competition, they played in Burgas or Sofia.
“Step by step, everything will fall into place. Even before the match, I said that “Maribor” is the favorite, because for many years it has been playing qualifiers and also in the groups of the European tournaments. “Botev” is gradually returning to the map of Europe. We have a bit more chance than we had at the beginning of the match. We have to be careful of mistakes in the second leg”, said the Plovdiv coach Dusan Kerkez after the match.
“Ivelin Popov is very easy to play with. We are not going to Slovenia to defend ourselves, on the contrary, we are going to perform even better. I came to “Botev” because of the unique audience”, said one of the scorers for Plovdiv – Anthony Udzha.
The coach of “Maribor” Ante Shimunja admitted that he expected the match to be difficult for his team. But he threatened that everything would be different in Slovenia.
“Botev” is a great team, but we deserved more than this loss. We created chances but we couldn’t score. Maybe the opponent did things a few times that we didn’t expect, but that’s football. That was just the first game. It will be different in the second leg. We will rely on our fans”, said the former coach of “Ludogorets”.