Marked for Krišs Kārkliņš
From our football correspondent
Uneasy
Squad9 Nov 2026
A fracture rules Gibson Okocha out for 86 days
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Ventspils will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
Squad9 Nov 2026
Mihkel Ainsalu and a teammate went at it, and not about football. Training grounds are small places and a long season makes them smaller.
Squad9 Nov 2026
A row about effort at Ventspils
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Abdulrafiu Taiwo was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
Back issues
From our football correspondent
Uneasy
Squad5 Oct 2026
A knee injury of the worst kind for Kasiuss Kosovs
19 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Ventspils lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Squad5 Oct 2026
“I have given this everything, but my family is not here and neither am I, not really.” A footballer can be coached out of bad form. Nobody has ever been coached out of this, and Ventspils know it.
Squad5 Oct 2026
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Ventspils this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
From our football correspondent
Crisis
Match12 Aug 2026
Daugavpils ended it 2‑3. The season narrows to the league now, and everyone in the ground knew it before the final whistle.
Squad17 Aug 2026
52 days, the scan says, and scans are kinder than reality. The fixtures in that window have just become somebody else’s job.
Squad17 Aug 2026
Mihkel Ainsalu and a teammate went at it, and not about football. Training grounds are small places and a long season makes them smaller.
Transfer targets17 Aug 2026
The approach was made and the answer came back in a sentence. There is no number on the table because there was no number that would have been enough.
Squad17 Aug 2026
A row about effort at Ventspils
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Abdulrafiu Taiwo was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
Squad17 Aug 2026
He is doing things every Saturday that nobody around him can answer. It is flattering for a season and a problem after that, and Ventspils know which stage they are at.
Market17 Aug 2026
“We are a long way apart, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.” Neither side is close, and the calendar is not on the club's side.
The dugout17 Aug 2026
The view from the dugout
“We will look at it, we will learn from it, and we go again.” The three sentences every manager keeps for a 2‑3 defeat, delivered by Kristaps Cauna to a room that had heard them before.
Transfer targets17 Aug 2026
A loan enquiry to Partizan: cover, or a look at somebody the club cannot afford to buy yet. Either way the answer will come back inside the week.