After a weekend in which they scored 77 points, the Vukovi Belgrade are seeking their second win of the season in a game against the Bratislava Monarchs, on Saturday in Belgrade, starting from 5PM.
Although the Monarchs lost in Austria in their first game, they’ll be a much tougher opponent, but exactly how tough is hard to tell. No team has played more than three games, but it’s not hard, nor unreasonable, to already say that Belgrade will have more competition from teams in the North conference, than from their direct competitors in the South conference, except in the Novi Sad Dukes.
“I watched a couple of their Youtube clips from last year, some research I’ve done on their website”, says Belgrade’s player coach Jordan Green.
On the other hand, the Vukovi themselves are a little bit of an enigma — winning by 74 points is impressive, but probably not much more than winning by 40, or 50, and the game video, if Bratislava has seen it, doesn’t tell much, just because of how easy it was.
“Everyone who knows anything about football knows the score doesn’t really tell you how the game was. A lot of games are decided by one play here one play there, so I’m not too worried about the score.”
Green, the Vukovi’s starting quarterback gave way to their top backup Nemanja Petković after the first quarter in the opening week, because the game was never in doubt. How much he’ll play this time, again depends on the how close, or not, the game will be. The Bratislava Monarchs are definitely a better team than Zagreb, even though their loss against the Gladiators was probably more convincing than what can be interpreted from the final score.
“It will be the toughest game this year, up to this point. I’m interested to see what our team does against a stronger opponent, because I don’t expect to score on every possession. I’m curious to see how the team’s going to react to adversity.”
The game is also very important for Bratislava, as they surely didn’t plan to start with two losses before the season started. It’s not a must win game for them yet, but they don’t want to fall too much behind in the conference standings.
All this is not a problem for the Vukovi, who have had a fantastic start, playing in the CEFL and the Serbian league, winning three games mixing up their first and second team. The average victory margin in those games was close to 65 points, and losing is not what they have in mind currently.