Following Monday evening’s welcome celebration, today with clear heads we can freely confirm last night’s statement – a catastrophic celebration of the European title! Without a concept, without direction, without ideas. The City of Skopje this year showed how welcome celebration of European champions, national winners, should not and must not be organized.

Vardar handball players managed to conquer handball Europe, and win the hearts of the ‘old continent’, but failed to awaken the sense of national affiliation, national happiness and unity in the hearts of the organizers of the City of Skopje. And we can say that Vardar is a private club, professional players from almost all corners of the world, but the success is national. The success of Vardar, as well as that of Kometal Gjorce Petrov, will be recorded in national successes. And no matter that Vardar is a private club, a foreign investment, those people who were left without the promised transport to the airport, are not that. They are taxpayers, and deceived citizens. And the City of Skopje is an unserious budget user.

Many things were poorly organized and the whole organization had only one purpose-to spoil the party, to destroy the party and to reduce the euphoria. Because the crowd radiated with a spontaneous rush of patriotism, because people on the square were chanting “We have one name”, “Never North, always Macedonia”… and they wanted to diminish that somehow.

The city of Skopje had at least 24 hours to organize a welcome celebration like the one in 2017. Or better. But not a worse one.

Mayor Petre Shilegov informed the public that the city will organize a charter flight for the Vardar team from Cologne to Skopje, with which the players would land earlier than predicted (although after two or three delays, they arrived a little earlier than if they had traveled with a regular line), but did not say whose idea was to place the stage over the square in order to gather fewer people and what are the “administrative obstacles” for the delayed flight.

Moreover, the stage on the square was small, and there was no host, no program, the national anthem was intonated in the middle of the non-existing program, while the handball players were on the stage, trying to figure out what to do on their own.

One gets the impression that someone worked systematically, with a plan in those 24 hours for an organization to kill the euphoria, to take away the decibels of the crowd, and thus also silence the handball players who dedicated their victory to Macedonia.