Marked for Revaz Ananidze
From our football correspondent
Crisis
Market26 Oct 2026
“I have given everything here and I need a new challenge.” The request is formal, and the relationship will never be quite the same again.
Player ratings26 Oct 2026
Successful dribbles: 27. There is a particular sort of despair on a full-back's face by the seventieth minute, and it was on display.
Match24 Oct 2026
The wait goes on for Pobeda
4 without a win now, and the ground has developed the special quiet of a crowd that expects the worst. One scrappy 1-0 would cure most of it; that is the maddening part.
Squad26 Oct 2026
Tempers go at Pobeda
Amirkhan Temukov was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
Match24 Oct 2026
The goals have deserted Pobeda
3 matches, no goals, and a training ground that has tried everything. It will end — droughts always do — but nobody at Pobeda can tell you which week it ends in.
Match24 Oct 2026
0‑1 to Rubin Yalta, and no complaints worth printing. The performance asked for nothing more than it got.
Squad26 Oct 2026
“Nobody here is above being told.” It was not said with a name attached, but the dressing room can count, and so can everybody who was listening.
Loan watch26 Oct 2026
“I did not go to Dinamo Barnaul to sit and watch. I want to come back to Pobeda and fight for my place.” 0 appearances in 5 matches say the rest.
Market26 Oct 2026
He is 20, and nobody at Pobeda signed him for this season. Deals like this are judged in four years, by people who may not still be in the building.
Back issues
From our football correspondent
Upbeat
Squad5 Oct 2026
A knee injury of the worst kind for Guram Mikautadze
27 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Saburtalo lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Squad5 Oct 2026
Beka Dartsmelia was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
Squad5 Oct 2026
Tornike Arveladze is the division's best young player this month
At 20 he has spent a month being better than everybody his age in the league, which is a different and harder thing than one good afternoon. Saburtalo will try very hard not to make too much of it.
From our football correspondent
Upbeat
Squad21 Sep 2026
A knee injury of the worst kind for Guram Mikautadze
41 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Saburtalo lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Player ratings21 Sep 2026
Arseny Rodionov, 20, plays like he has been here for years — 7.94
A mark of 7.94 means one thing beside a twenty-nine-year-old's name and something else entirely beside a 20-year-old's. Nobody at the ground needed telling which this was.
Squad21 Sep 2026
Arseny Rodionov was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
Match19 Sep 2026
Beaten 2‑3, and beaten fairly. The manager kept his words short afterwards, which was probably wise.
Player ratings21 Sep 2026
There is a version of this player everybody suspected was in there, and on this evidence it is. 8.26, and no argument anywhere in the ground.
Loan watch21 Sep 2026
“I did not go to Dinamo Batumi to sit and watch. I want to come back to Saburtalo and fight for my place.” 0 appearances in 6 matches say the rest.
Player ratings21 Sep 2026
Successful dribbles: 15. Every time he got the ball somebody had to make a decision, and every time the decision was wrong.
Squad21 Sep 2026
“Thirty minutes, door closed, everything said. We shook hands after.” Whatever was in the room stayed in the room, and Tornike Arveladze trained the next morning like a man with less to carry.
Squad21 Sep 2026
Lasha Kvaratskhelia falls out with a teammate over standards
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.