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The 2020/2021 Champions League (BL) competition starts on Tuesday, which will include Ferencváros after 25 years. The 31-time Hungarian champion will play her first group stage match at one of football’s sanctuaries, the home of Barcelona, at 9:00 p.m. on Tuesday night. Origo Sport heads to Spain to report first-hand on anything that may be important for the match.
I am very badly raised, it is always a torment to fly out of bed, and on weekends this is even more powerful. On Sunday, however, I did not get up on the clock, even though the alarm would have sounded at 4.35, but only, ten minutes before the time set the night before. What was the reason for this?
The answer is simple, I have embarked on one of the greatest adventures of my career as a sports journalist, traveling by car to Barcelona for Fradi’s first BL game this year. The plural is also not a coincidence, we cut ourselves in a minibus for a total of seven to get from Lionel Messi’s house in Budapest in two days.
We plan 1200 km for the first Sunday of the approximately 2000 km hike. We managed to maintain that too, in addition to a pretty great time of just 13 hours, which included a few stops and various road works along the way.
Among them, there was something we wanted ourselves, but there were also two that happened due to stricter official controls due to the coronavirus epidemic. First, there was a complete diversion of traffic on the border between Hungary and Slovenia, during which we had to cross a checkpoint. We still got our way with a nod and a pass, but we were no longer so lucky on the Italian-Slovenian border.
Immediately after our arrival in Italy, the police pulled us aside and vividly asked us for what purpose and where we were going. When we said that we were journalists and we were going to Barcelona for the Ferencváros BL game, then the policeman, who had been serious until then, turned back smiling, thanked us for the information and said goodbye to us.
This was followed by a few more hours of travel before reaching the picturesque village of Bordighera, where we occupied our accommodation on Sunday evening. We will continue early on Monday morning, because in the afternoon, first Barcelona and then Ferencváros will give a press conference before the meeting on Tuesday, and there will be Origo Sport, of course. The Ferencváros team will also fly to Barcelona on Monday morning. The press conference of the local team will begin at 12 noon. For this, Barcelona does not admit journalists (not even Spanish), the event will be broadcast online. Fradi’s press conference, for its part, will not close and journalists will be admitted to the event from 6.30 pm. Then Ferencváros’ training at the Camp Nou begins at 7:00 p.m.
Barcelona are not in top form, as Saturday’s league game shows, as Ronald Koeman’s band suffered a 1-0 defeat at Getafe’s home. Fradi played in Kisvárda on Friday, where Sergei Rebrov’s team won 2-0.
It is important that the referee of the match is the Swiss Sandro Schärer. On October 11, he led the Hungarian team in the Nations League match against the Serbs, which we won 1-0 with a goal from Norbert Könyves. The video assistants will be Italian.
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