Lovely 4-0 score, Blanco (twice), Libe, and DELLAS all on the scoreboard, such a great site to see! Blanco’s form has been incredible lately and now that Zorro is back it feels like a day hasn’t passed since three years ago.
Unfortunately, we still sit a fair bit back from the top. However, what is important is that we took care of getting a positive result against a team who has always been a bit of a struggle for us. We didn’t play the best football we’ve seen all season long, but we turned things on when we needed to, took advantage of having an extra player, and made sure didn’t slip points like we did last week.
Arabatzis started in net and did well. He’s been looking quite solid in the air lately, rarely fails when he commits to the ball and I can’t complain with him at all. We needed him to be in top form seeing as Larissa came to the game with the intention of picking up some points. They created a number of decent chances, particularly in the first, which fortunately for us resulted in nothing.
I’m going to hold back on commenting much on individual players since my stream wasn’t the greatest, but I did notice a huge improvement in our play when Lagos and Kafes came on in exchange for Leonardo and Scocco. Scocco was busy upfront from what I saw, though the addition of Kafes and Lagos to the match seemed to improve our attack as a whole. Leonardo created little from what I saw, but I did miss alot so I don’t want to be too hard on the guy.
The referee was horrendous today, to the point where I was starting to feel quite outraged (well, not quite but I was certainly irritated). I can only imagine what everyone in the stadium was feeling. Unfortunately, only around 6,000 showed up for the match however as it was a very cold weekend in Athens (from the pictures I saw it looks like they received a decent amount of snow for so early in December). Hopefully we’ll see a better attendance figure at the match with Zenit, despite the late start time of 10:00 at night (well done UEFA, well done).
Also, it’s worth noting that Jimenez was kicked out of the match today and forced to watch much of it from the stands. He was off when the substitutions were made however it looked like he was still contacting his assistants on the pitch.
So, a decent performance, yet a fantastic result. Hopefully this gives us a confidence boost ahead of our critical match with Zenit!
As always, leave comments below. I would appreciate any as it is hard to watch these matches with such poor streams available!
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