Lazarov: "If I were not Macedonian, I would not have come back" - and he wants respect for it

Alkaloid's coach and the Macedonian national team's head coach Kiril Lazarov has spoken about why he came home after a 25-year playing career. In an interview for Balkan Handball he put it bluntly: "If I were not Macedonian, I would not have come back to Macedonia. Somebody can say I am this or that, but nobody can dispute what I have done for Macedonian handball." He also used a word rarely said out loud in domestic sport - the "chaos" he entered knowingly. For five or six years he has been working with youth categories and with the seniors, he says, so that no generational drop is felt. He ended his career in 2022 and immediately took the Alkaloid bench, having been national coach since 2021, while still playing. A man who has to ask for respect usually no longer gets it automatically - and that says more about the system than about him.

54:37 for Alkaloid, a third for Ohrid: Macedonian handball is rising in the Regional League

Alkaloid put the defeat by Partizan behind them and took apart Lovcen 54:37 for a first win in the Regional League. They dominated both halves - the first 27:17, the second 27:20 - and Borzas with eight goals was the most effective. The same evening RK Ohrid beat Dinamo Pancevo away 30:28 and are three from three. The hosts led 15:13 at the break, but after the interval the Ohrid side turned it around, with Mate and his eight goals the standout name. Pelister had earlier recorded a second win. Three Macedonian clubs, three positive results in one round - but the regional league is also a measure of how insufficient the domestic competition is to keep them sharp.

Cupic before Vardar's return to the elite: "The shirt is heavy and it is not for everyone"

Ivan Cupic has brought Vardar back to the Superleague title for the first time since 2022, and with it into the Champions League after four seasons away. The Croat, who won the same league with the club as a player, talks about Skopje without reservation: "I consider Vardar, Skopje and Macedonia my second home." And he adds a line many Skopje fans will be copying out: "Not everyone can play for Vardar and not everyone can be Vardar's coach." Vardar are in Group B with MT Melsungen, Nantes and Wisla Plock, opening the season in Germany - against a side coached by Roberto Garcia Parrondo, a former Vardar coach and his own coach. The target, he says, is a top-two finish. The summer brought seven new players, among them Matteo Fadhuile, the second-highest scorer in the French league with 204 goals.

Jane Sandanski as an argument: the first home game in the elite in four years

What Cupic calls the hottest court in Europe is about to be tested - Nantes come to Jane Sandanski for Vardar's first home Champions League game since 2022. "The hall will be too small for all the people who love Vardar", says the coach, who has played on that floor both as a home player and as a visitor. He is asking the players to earn it rather than inherit it: through the game, the conduct, the relationship with the shirt. Skopje has a long habit of producing an atmosphere opponents remember longer than the result. This time the question is whether atmosphere will substitute for experience - almost nobody in the new squad has played a game in this competition.

The Superleague has four teams going for the title, and that does not happen often

What Cupic mentioned at the end is perhaps the best news for domestic handball: Vardar, Eurofarm Pelister, RK Ohrid and Alkaloid are all fighting for the title. "The other teams have serious quality. That is why the league is strong", he says, and immediately withdraws from further comment on the opposition. A league this size rarely has four clubs with realistic ambitions, and all four are simultaneously playing in the regional competition too. Handball is for now the sport in which Macedonia apologises least when it steps onto a European court. How long the clubs themselves can sustain that is a question nobody is putting to any of them.