Vojvodina will play the fourth friendly match today as part of the main part of the preparations for the new season. At 6:30 p.m., the rival of the red and whites will be AEK from Larnaca, the third-placed team of the Cypriot championship from last season. The match will be played in Willdon, Austria.
The beginnings of football in Larnaca date back to 1924, when FC Pezoporikos was founded in this city. However, just two years later, a group of Pezoporikos players decided to found a new club – FC AMOL. Only six years later, the two clubs united under the name EPA Larnaca, and in 1937 a group of players from this team left the club and re-founded FC Pezoporikos. Several decades later, more precisely in 1994, the two clubs reunited and formed FC AEK, which takes 1994 as the official year of its foundation. This club functions according to the principle of sports associations from Spain, which means that it also has its own sections in other sports, specifically in men’s basketball, women’s volleyball and men’s futsal, and the unification took place precisely in order to create a club that will be able to compete in various sports without any financial problems.
AEK in Greek is an abbreviation for “Athletiki Enosi Kition”, which in translation means “Athletic Union of Kition” (Kition is the name of the ancient Greek city that was located on the site of today’s Larnaca). In the coat of arms of AEK, there is an image of Admiral Kimon, who died in a sea battle around 450 BC, while defending the city from the Persians, and immediately before the battle, he ordered his soldiers to spread the news of his possible death kept as a secret. The saying applies to him: “Even in death, he was victorious.”
Although the clubs that formed AEK, namely EPA and Pezoporikos, together won 12 trophies (five titles, six Cups and one Super Cup), this club managed to bring three trophies to its display cases after 1994, namely two Cup (2004 and 2018) and one Cyprus Super Cup (2018).
In European competitions, AEK achieved its greatest success last season, when it reached the round of 16 of the Conference League, where it was eliminated by eventual winners West Ham United. AEK reached the round of 16 of the Conference League by taking third place in the group stage of the Europa League, in a group with Dynamo from Kyiv, Rennes and Fenerbahce, and in the third round of qualification for this competition they were better than Partizan from Belgrade (2-1 win at home and draw 2-2 away).
Last season, AEK became only the second Cypriot team that managed to welcome spring in Europe (previously APOEL, Vojvodina’s opponent in the second round of qualification for the Conference League, who reached the quarterfinals of the Champions League in 2012). Apart from last season, AEK participated in the group stage of the Europa League in 2012 and 2019, and this club holds the record in Cypriot football as the team that achieved the biggest victory in European competitions, since in the 2011/12 season it has beaten Flora in Malta with a score of 0-8 (the biggest European victory among Serbian teams is held by Vojvodina, which beat Iraklis with 9-1 in 1961, i.e. Red Star, which beat the then amateur team Dudelange from Luxembourg with the same score). In the same season, AEK equaled APOEL’s record for the number of consecutive European matches without defeat – six. This season, just like Vojvodina, AEK will participate in the second round of qualification for the Conference League, where they will meet the team Torpedo-BelAZ Zhodin from Belarus.
As for the current AEK team, it is a team coached by the 54-year-old Spaniard Jose Luis Oltra, and the value of his team is estimated at around 12.28 million euros. The former Serbian national team member Nenad Tomović plays for this team, and the captain is the former North Macedonian national team member and at one time the best player and top scorer of the Cypriot league, Ivan Tričkovski, who previously played in Serbia for Red Star. In addition to those two and Cypriot players, AEK also has four players from Spain, two each from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Portugal, and one each from Argentina, India, Cameroon, Brazil, Hungary, Morocco and Colombia. AEK performs at the stadium AEK arena – Georgios Karapatakis with a capacity of 8,000 seats and plays at home in green and yellow, and away in completely black equipment.
On the other hand, the Manager of Vojvodina, Radoslav Batak, will probably bring a somewhat rejuvenated team to the field tonight, that is, a team mostly made up of players who did not play in the previous match against Slaven Belupo. The match will be broadcast directly on the Youtube channel of FK Vojvodina via the link:
