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Search: ' Skonto Riga'

Stories

Focus on Marian Pahars: The livewire Latvian who helped Southampton settle at St Mary’s

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The first player from his country to play in the Premier League, the striker became a cult hero among fans despite injury problems in his seven years on the south coast

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Stable mates

One-team dominance has been broken in Georgia but, as Margot Dunne finds, football’s continued revival depends on peace and politics

On a warm August evening in Tbilisi’s Boris Paichadze National Stadium, a crowd of over 20,000 is roaring on the Georgian champions Zestafoni in their Europa League play-off against Club Brugge. But, strangely, the majority aren’t supporters of either of the teams involved in the tie. Most are fans of Zestafoni’s main domestic rival and Georgia’s biggest club, Dinamo Tbilisi.

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Dancing on ice

Aleksander Goryunov is concerned about Skonto Riga, struggling against economic downturn and a huge sporting rival

The end of April saw the reigning Latvian champions Skonto Riga, managed by the former Southampton striker Marians Pahars, host leaders Metalurgs. Over 800 fans turned up at the 10,000-capacity Skonto Stadium to witness a dominant performance by the visitors. With the home team 2-0 down we were treated to the surreal sight of the 30-odd Skonto ultras behind the goal “doing the Poznan” in the near-empty ground. It will take much more than this to inject some life into Latvia’s most successful club.

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Economy of sale

Latvia's unstable economy has affected football too, as Daunis Auers explains

The 2009 Latvian Virsliga season kicked off in mid-March under cold and dark skies. So cold and dark, in fact, that pitches across the country remained frozen, forcing games to be played at the Riga Olympic Centre, a modest indoor facility with a tight, vertigo-inducing balcony along one side of the pitch. Two rows of free-standing chairs give it a capacity of about 300.

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Scottish Division One 1974-75

Ian Campbell reviews the season in which Rangers broke Celtic hearts

The long-term significance
Rangers ended Celtic’s run of nine successive league titles, which had equalled a European record set a decade earlier by the Bulgarian army club CDNA (later CSKA) Sofia. Rangers went on to match this themselves between 1989 and 1997; Skonto Riga of Latvia are the current holders of the record, with 14 championships in a row up to 2005. This was the final season of an 18-team top level in Scotland. Concern about the gap in playing standards between the leading few clubs and the rest led to the creation of the Scottish Premier Division in 1975‑76, with ten teams playing each other four times a season. In 1998 this became the Scottish Premier League, whose current format involves 12 clubs playing a total of 38 matches.

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