After the Ukrainians, the Russians – after the victory and a convincing game against Olimpik from Donetsk (1:0) and the warrior mentality in the duel with Dnipro (2:2), the “blues” will compete with Rotor in Antalya.
The first league team from Volgograd finished the autumn part of the season in 13th place in the barrage zone – it won 14 points in 19 games, it is seven points away from the safe zone, while it has one point more than the place that leads to the Second League of Russia.
The team from the former Stalingrad (Volgograd bears the honorary title of “hero city” since the Battle of Stalingrad took place there) last season dominated the Second League of Russia and is now getting used to the first league team, playing at the Volgograd Arena which receives 45,568 spectators and was built for needs of the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Rotor was founded in 1929, the biggest successes of the club are the runner-up places in the championship (1993, 1997) and the Cup (1995), and the current president is retired water polo representative Andrej Rekečinski, who won silver at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. four years later he was bronze in Athens, and in 2001 he was also third at the World Championships in Fukuoka.
The coach of the Russian Premier League is the former coach of Belarus and former head of the professional staff of Dinamo Kiev Alexander Katskevich, the roster is composed mainly of domestic players, and there are legionnaires led by former young Ivory Coast national team player Cedric Gogua (ex Partizan, CSKA Moscow …) , representatives of Kazakhstan Yuri Logvinenko, Dmitri Shomko and Alexei Shotkin (ex Astana), representative of Belarus Ivan Majevski (ex Astana, we watched him under Gorica in the duel Montenegro – Belarus), representative of Georgia Giorgi Aribadze (ex Shakhtar, Nacional, Adanaspor) and striker and occasional member of the Venezuelan national team Andres Pons (ex Livorno, Sampdoria)…
Rotor has played four games in preparation so far, he has not been defeated once, and he has scored at least one goal in every match – he drew with Polish Jagiellonia (1: 1) , and they defeated the Slovenian Mura (2: 1), the Kazakh Aktobe (2: 1) and the Bulgarian Slavia from Sofia (3: 1).
The match Buducnost – Rotor starts at 17.00 Turkish time, and at 15.00 our time.
