Kaunas Stumbras had more than a week to prepare for the next A league match. Today Stumbras players will travel to Vilnius where they will meet Riteriai club in 2nd round of Lithuanian championship.

Head coach of Stumbras Joao Luis Martins, says that his team is growing with every new day, and that the match against Riteriai will be the most important because it will be the next one in the championship.

Coach, how is the team ready for the battle against Riteriai?

We are always ready, or at least I always believe that we are. I always like to think in that direction – today we are better than we were yesterday and today, I hope we will be even better than in the previous match.

In my opinion, the team is growing with every new day, the players work very very hard and I am extremely satisfied with it. This is the main reason why I think the team will only be better with each day.

What challenges do you face in preparing for the match?

There will be things to improve all the time. We have a plan on how to do it and keep it up, but as the season goes, new challenges, problems or situations are emerging that we need to address. That’s the life, that’s the life of football.

Therefore, we must work and work again to solve our problems and become stronger.

In the previous season, Riteriai were one of our main competitors. Will this match be special and important this year?

This should be the most important match for us as it will be the next championship match. In the last season, we and them were fighting for very good positions in the tournament. They always had a team fighting for top positions in A lyga, and last year it was a new experience for us.

We hope that this year and again we will be able to be two big fighters for good positions. We know that this season, we will play them at least four times, also we can meet them in LFF cup or A lyga top6 battles.

In each match we will only fight for three points. We know that what happened in the past season is no longer relevant now. It will be a new duel, a new team, a new start. But it is clear that Riteriai will be a strong contender because I am in Lithuania since 2016 and they always had a strong team.