Partizan Flies to Kostanay With 22, No Ugresic
Partizan left for Kostanay with 22 players and a 3-0 lead from the first leg. Ugresic stayed in Belgrade with a hamstring problem, Aleksic was a doubt until departure, and Baba is not in the squad.
On Tuesday at noon, two days before the second leg, Partizan’s squad set off for Kazakhstan. The travel list held 22 players, and one name that had been mentioned around Humska all week did not make the cut.
Ognjen Ugresic stayed behind in Belgrade. The midfielder has not recovered enough from the hamstring injury that also kept him out of the first match against Tobol. Instead of a trip spanning several thousand kilometers, he gets a week of rehab work at home and one clear date to build toward: the league game against Radnicki 1923 next weekend.
Aleksic Was a Doubt Until the Last Moment
Whether Milan Aleksic would even travel stayed unclear right up until the plane left. The midfielder has been struggling with tendon pain, and the coaching staff under Sasa Ilic put off the call until the list had to be finalized. The choice was blunt: take him and risk making the injury worse, or leave him in Belgrade to heal while the schedule sorts itself out.
New signing Baba is not in contention for this match either, one more option gone from a squad where Ilic already has little room to rotate up front.
Ze Travels, But With a Condition
Brazilian forward Zeferson Marinjo dos Santos, known around the club simply as Ze, has been a story of his own for about ten days now. He hurt his quad in Sabac, came off after a little over an hour, and missed several training sessions afterward. Early this week he showed positive signs of recovery and returned to full training with the squad, only for the situation to get complicated again, sending the striker back to solo sessions.
Ahead of departure, the club signaled that he should still be on the flight to Kazakhstan, with a reservation nobody is hiding: he only gets minutes if the score and the flow of the game allow it. Since joining Partizan he has logged 108 minutes on the pitch and has yet to score.
What Is at Stake in Kostanay?
The second leg of the third qualifying round for the Conference League is played Thursday at 17:00 in Kostanay. Partizan won the first leg in Belgrade 3-0 and carries into Kazakhstan a lead that is rarely thrown away, with the winner advancing to the qualifying playoff round.
Both clubs rearranged their week around this fixture. Partizan pushed back its away league match against Radnicki in the Serbian SuperLiga, and Tobol did the same with its own domestic game. For the Belgrade side, the long trip and a schedule that resumes immediately after the return leg meant moving the departure forward by two days.
Add it all up and a list of 22 names only sounds comfortable until you read who is on it, and who is not. Ugresic stayed home, Aleksic was uncertain until the very end, Baba is out of contention, and Ze is on the plane but under a condition. That is a thin bench for an away game in another time zone, played midweek between two league rounds.
A three-goal cushion covers a lot of ground. It covers a poor opening twenty minutes and one goal conceded, but it does not cover a careless approach, and Tobol has nothing left to lose on home soil in Kostanay, which is the one part of this equation working against Partizan.
The next checkpoint is Thursday at 17:00, followed right after by Radnicki 1923 next weekend. Only then will it be clear how much this trip really cost.
