European Win and PAOK preview

By: Minas | October 25th, 2009

SALPIGOAL_2009_10_22_23_29_55_b

Some hours ago, ~~Olympiakos~~ defeated Ergotelis (2-1) at Karaiskaki, and now they are first. That means that we must win against PAOK tomorrow , so that we return to the first place.

On Thursday we played against Sturm Graz at OAKA, for Europa League. Salpingidis’ penalty kick helped us win (1-0) in a not so good game. But the most important thing is that we have many possibilities to qualify to the next round. (We have 6 points, while Dinamo have 3 and Sturm 1 – Galata have 7)

There were about 35000 Green fans at OAKA. Our starting eleven was : Tzorvas, Spyropoulos,Gabriel,Sarriegi,Vyntra,Gilberto,Karagounis,Katsouranis,Leto,Salpingidis,Cisse.

The first half wasn’t good.We had lots of corner kicks, but we didn’t create any chance to score. Sturm played defensive, and they also didn’t have any chances. To summarize, the first half was actually boring (as usual, most of our first halves are boring), and no team deserved to score a goal.

In the second half, Henk ten Kate decided to substitute Katsouranis(who played quite bad in this game) with Ninis. In the beginning, we still played bad, until the moment Salpingidis was fouled by Mario Sonnleitner in the box. Salpi scored (60′) , and the match after that became faster.

3 minutes later, Gordon Schildenfeld’s header hit our post. Karagounis’ shot hit Sturm’s post as well. The Austrian side had another one chance ; on the 66th minute, Tzorvas saved two times Sturm’s shots, preventing them to equalize.

Our last good chance was 10 minutes before the end of the game, when Cisse’s shot was stopped by Gratzei’s leg.

It was a very important win ; now we are the favorites to qualify. Our two Brazilians, Gabriel and Gilberto, were our best players.Tzorvas had a good match as well, while Katsouranis and Karagounis didn’t play good.

Now we play against PAOK, for the Greek Superleague.

Last year, at OAKA, we defeated PAOK 3-0 and 4-1. I think that we won’t have many difficulties for this match. PAOK are missing a lot of players, while Fernando Santos will probably decide to play defensive instead of aggresive. I think that if he PAOK play aggresive, they will have more chances to win anything from this match, because as we all know, our defense sucks.

Our starting lineup will probably be the same. Unfortunately it is raining a lot these days in Athens, meaning that the pitch won’t be in the best condition.

Good luck to Panatha!