In today’s interview, we will take a look back at the first half of the season, but we will also take a look at the plans for next year together with the club’s General Director, Ladislav Kazan.
How satisfied is he, after the passage of time, with the first part of the season?
“We are extremely satisfied, we managed to advance in the cup and play against Slovan Bratislava. We had a rocket start to the league, we won many matches, we held first and second place for a long time. The team’s performances gradually improved, until the match in Veľké Lovce, where the performance of the team slowed down, also in Šoporňa. So we are satisfied, except for the attitude of some individuals, which we did not like.” The draw made it so that the toughest opponent awaited us in the last round, although it was a loss, but the only one in fifteen games, which is a decent calling card considering the plan to rejuvenate and stabilize the team. “Yes, the draw arranged it that way, the disappointment was only because many fans traveled and the performance was not worthy of our club. However, the players will retaliate in the way we have done in the past, they will pay the entrance fee for the first home game of the second half of the season. I hope this way we can get fans back after the restart of the season. We managed to achieve the goal of stabilizing and rejuvenating the team, I was of course satisfied in this regard. A lot of good work was done, from the club management to the implementation team, everyone worked on the details.” What pleased him the most in the first half of the season? “Overall, hats off to the first half of the season, also in terms of youth and other things around the club. I was pleased with many things, for example, we played a match against the third division Galanta, where we certainly did not disappoint, we drew 0:0. I am glad that the coach included young home boys, Berecz and Kolarovský in the lineup and that he gave them a chance in some matches. I hope that they will get even more chances in the next half-year, because they deserve it for their efforts and performances in the matches they played.”
Waht´s the plan for our A team in the second half of the season? “By the second half of the season, we plan to rejuvenate the team even more. Competition will definitely come to the team, we want to play even more attractive, offensive football. We scored few goals in the first half, but we want to score even more goals. We want to continue to be in the top three, that is the goal of the A team.”
Many things have been put into motion again in the club, the infrastructure is improving, what are the plans for the near future? “We have improved many things, we have built a new grandstand, the construction of the training pitch has started. After completion, we would like to renovate the main playground again. We are planning to purchase a bus, which would be used in the future for our academy, which we plan to start, in such a way that we would also consider children from the surrounding villages. There is also a second training ground in the plan, which we will start negotiating with the mayor next year, but for this we need a lot of support from the village, a subsidy for youth and sports. We have also introduced youth contributions, every month the players from A team pays a youth fee, which I think is not common in Slovakia, we want to keep this “Baťa´s” way in our club, we want to support the youth, our people, our club, the academy. We are working on rebuilding the U19 team, I believe it will be successful and we will have enough players to be satisfied with the structure of the club. The U11 will be added to the U9 category, and I hope that we will also keep the U15 and manage to create as many youth teams as possible. It will be necessary to bring in more coaches, but I am very glad that our former players, Pénzeš, Šlosár, Lacko Tóth and Matúš Labuda, have taken it. It’s great that they are with us.”
However, the general director also worked on other things during the spring, it was possible to conclude a strategic cooperation with the Gábr Királya Academy in Szombathely, what does this cooperation bring to our club? “Of course, Gábor Király is a huge legend of Hungarian football. It is a “knowledge share”, that is, an exchange of knowledge between his academy and our club. Our coaches can go there for an internship, to a soccer tournament, and our goalkeepers also have the opportunity to go to his camp. Our teams can go there to play matches, they can go to camps. We know that in Hungary the conditions for football are much higher, they are equal to those in Austria and Germany. We also used this for our training camp, which we completed for the first time ever in such top conditions. I have to say that Gábor Király is also a great personality when it comes to contacts, so if our players have what it takes to go to, say, the 4th, 3rd, 2nd, Hungarian league, then we will work on it so that they can move through this as well direction. In addition to the Gábor Király academy, we also started cooperation with the Green Herons Dubai club, where the former AC Milan player, Ibrahim Ba, is the coach, and thanks to these contacts, we met great players such as Paolo Maldini or, for example, the agent of Fabio Cannavaro, or the former agent of Maradona . We also established contact with one Austrian team and a team from the second Czech league. We will use all these contacts in the future for Brančan youth so that they can cooperate and work on themselves and, last but not least, so that they have motivation and that our club has a long-term future.”
We can consider the match with Slovan as the peak of autumn, 1700 people at our stadium, great football, selfless performance of our players, Ladislav Kazan considers it an opportunity to start something big. “Let our match of the century be a connection for everyone in the Zobor region, for all companies that want to support sports and culture. We believe that people will join us so that no one is relying on one person to fund it. After the match with Slovan, the youth got hungrier for football. We have shown that we are always going up, we are building the infrastructure, that we know how to organize big matches. I believe that the fans also understood that we are one team, that we have to help each other, for example, as the Japanese showed at the current World Cup. I would like us to unite here, help each other, create a strong club in the Zobor region that will represent the entire region. Just as it is in France, Belgium, where there was also a big crisis in football in 2010, but by joining 10-15 municipalities, one strong academy was created, this is also our goal for the future, and the match with Slovan was only the start of this whole project. By organizing this match, we also shut the mouths of all the haters and showed that we know how to play quality football and quality sports.”