February | 2025 | Hockeywanderer

February 13, 2025: Celje, Slovenia

NK Celje 2, APOEL 2

I can see the temptation to make a little fun of the Conference League.

Now in its fourth edition, it’s European football organizer UEFA’s third-tier club competition, below the all-powerful Champions League, and the one-tier-lower Europa League.

The argument that the Conference League is silly is that it creates, to use a college basketball analogy, an NIT below the NIT for teams not fit for purpose in UEFA’s already second-tier Europa League.

The argument in its favor¹ is that it offers the experience of European competition for teams, and fans, unlikely to experience it otherwise.

What I found in Celje, Slovenia, to where I manipulated my existing travel plans upon learning of the Conference League match, supports the latter argument.

It was the first of a two-leg playoff pitting APOEL, last year’s champions in Cyprus, against NK Celje, winners of the 23-24 Slovenian title.

It was the first round of the knockout playoffs after a league phase in the fall. And the first such European knockout game ever played in Celje.

As I exited my train through the tunnel into the station, the singing started. More than 1,000 APOEL fans were expected, and more then a few of them, in the orange jackets that marks their largest ultra group, got off the same train, and started singing.

NK Celje has a 13,000 seat stadium, well beyond its typical league attendance of under 2,000.

They didn’t need all the seats (or open all the stands of Z’dežele Stadium), but attendance was reported at 4,050, and their primary, modern east stand felt pretty full, and the crowd was enthusiastic and engaged.

With four goals, there was plenty to engage with, and both teams fought agressively over the ball as the home side took the lead twice, only to have their Cypriot opponents answer.

A 74th minute red card (second yellow) to APOEL gave the hosts an advantage they were not able to press, amid gratuitous time-wasting by the Cypriot side (the Ukrainian ref should have carded someone) and the tie moved to Lanarca a week later all even, a situation that should favor APOEL, which earned the higher seed in the league phase.

APOEL away fans light flares in Celje. — APOEL fans light flares in the away end before kickoff.

Celje had about 200-ish ultras behind the east goal, and they kept up the singing, drumming and flag-waving throughout. In contrast to my experience in Sandhausen, I found that this small-but-enthusiastic band and the “regular” Celje fans fed off each other, instead of living in separate worlds, and the audience as a whole, while full of kids, still had a real playoff vibe.

Plays and players: Kudos to Celje defender Lukasz Bejger, for a goal line save in the 27th minute after AOPEL’s Issam Chebake caught them by surprise on a quick restart and got one by the keeper.

Credit to AOPEL’s David Abagna for his spark-plug efforts in midfield, and Bejger’s central defense partner for Celje, Klemen Nemanič, for being a visibly steady hand on the back line.

Celje’s Lithuanian striker Armandas Kučys lit the touchpaper with a second-minute goal, but I’m at a loss to figure out how APOEL keeper Vid Belec managed to not save the shot, which came from a terrible angle.

On the bright side, he saved Kučys’ second-half penalty. On the not-so-bright side, he didn’t move as Kučys pounced on the rebound to score anyway.

Not so Nice: The rain of beer cups from the APEOL fan end after that goal.

The fire still burns: At first I gave APOEL’s ultras the pyro win, for lighting off a line of flares during the game introduction, while Celje’s stadium crew set off streamers.

But then, from outside the stadium, as the PA blared “Welcome to the Jungle” before kickoff, came a series of straight up July 4-style fireworks. I award a draw.

The UEFA full-time report is here.

NK Celje’s English writeup is here.

February 7, 2025: Sandhausen, Germany

SV Sandhausen 1, Armenia Bielefeld 0

Can they do it on a freezing night in Sandhausen?

I don’t know if that hackneyed analogy is fair to Sandhausen, or even Stoke, but I couldn’t help but think of it as I launched a brief football-centric European tour on the same Friday night I arrived in Germany.

Nothing like a very brisk breeze and third-division night football to fend off the specter of jet lag — and it worked.

The clubs are flying lower than they are used to: both were relegated from the 2. Bundesliga in 2023, though Bielefeld’s fall was more spectacular, having fallen out of the top division only a year earlier.

For Sandhausen, it marked the end of an 11-year run in the second league, during which they — remarkably — never finished higher than 10th.

Even the third division is a bit of a demographic stretch for Sandhausen, which has only 15,000 or so residents, though it’s only a 15-minute bus ride from Heidelberg. ¹

Sandhausen’s stadium reflects their history as scrappers, with an erector-set vibe and a bit of a hodgepodge, built a little-bit-at-a-time feel.

Plenty of room now for 4,518 fans, a fair number of whom made the 350 km journey from Bielefeld.

The Sandhausen setup puts the ultra groups side-by-side in the same end for easily comparable choreography, songs, chants, and pyro displays (to the repeated dismay of the stadium PA announcer). ²

Both organized sets of fans were loud and the Bielefelders literally never stopped singing or chanting.

But the atmosphere for the game as a whole was kind of unbalanced.

The side-by-side supporters groups , and their choreo, and their songs, were creating their own weather, separate from tall the action on the field.

SV Sandhausen ultras set off fireworks before their teams home match with Arminia Bielefeld. — Bielefeld ultras had more pyro by quantity, but Sandhausen’s set off straight-up fireworks before kickoff.

The rest of the fans were pretty quiet — surprisingly so. The game may not have been the soccer equivalent of a Rembrandt painting, but both teams played hard, and there was plenty of tension in the final minutes as Bielefeld poured it on, forcing home keeper David Richter to make some acrobatic saves, boosted by a dramatic goal line clearance from defender Jakob Lewald in the 89th or 90th minute, and the threat of a goalie goal in added time. ³

I didn’t feel that tension in the stands around me, or even among the ultras, who followed their own script.

The game itself was tilted largely in Bielefeld’s way, but they couldn’t get anything past Sandhausen’s keeper, and the hosts snuck ahead midway through the half with a set-piece the Bielefeld keeper could only save once, into the post where it ricocheted back for Marco Schikora to put his own rebound into the goal.

Quiet Riot: I’m glad Sandhausen scored, because I learned that their goal song is “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”

Too good to check: Sandhausen’s mascot may be … a skunk? That’s what it looked like to me.

Things I didn’t know ’til later: Keeper Richter made his debut for Sandhausen after coming over in the winter transfer window from Osnabruck, where he had lost his starting position.

Sandhausen hadn’t won since November, snapping the eight-game winless streak that cost previous coach Sreto Ristic his job. Before the game started, I’d have said Sandhausen was dangerously close to the relegation places, and Bielefeld sniffing at promotion, but the league is so tight they ended up closer to each other than the places offering a 3.Liga exit in either direction.

Game writeup from Bielefeld here and from Sandhausen here. (Auf Deutsch)

A game summary is here.

Hockeywanderer

Monthly Archives: February 2025

A European night in Slovenia

A frigid night in Baden-Württemberg

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