Bananas

I'd take Stafylidis over Vieirinha any day. Anyhow, let's see how Vieirinha goes. If it were up to me I wouldn't have him at the club. Go go go Vieirinha, prove me wrong.

I have become a Zen Master because of the many years of frustration. I agree we have an opportunity this year. The squad has the talent. Not sure if they have the drive. Ultimately, at least in my mind, it comes down to the manager. What we need is a manager that can get the best out of the players. I believe that deep down (and the players would never admit this of course) a lot of the players in our squad just accept defeat too easily. If Lucescu can somehow change this mind set, we are a chance. The truth is we haven't had a good manager in a long time. Santos was good. Very good actually. And I really liked Boloni. But in the Savvidis era the best we've had is Ivic and that's saying something as his only experience was as an U20's coach. But what he lacked in tactics and experience he made up for with good man management of the squad. Still though, Ivic wasn't really ready for PAOK. In an ideal world Ivic should've been an Assistant for a couple more years before stepping up. Even Lucescu is an unknown quantity. He's proven he can work well with a small team and make them competitive and hard to beat. But it's a whole other thing to be at PAOK. Does he know how to set up a team when you're expected to win ? Will the players listen to him ? Or will they just nod their heads and think "A re vlaka, I make 4 times more money than you and I'm going to screw my beautiful girl tonight". We will see.

Agree Yiankos. Our priority should have been a quality CB better than both Varela and Cresp. With Malezas and Poungouras as well we'd be good. Also what happens when Prijovic is rested, injured or just out of form ? But no, let's put all our effort into getting Vieirinha.

Ha ha, everyone has an opinion. Pelkas actually came back from Portugal a much better player. I believe when he was loaned PAOK had every intention of selling him but when he came back Tudor said that he was impressed with him. Both Pelkas and Kitsiou, ultimately, are just squad players. You wouldn't want Kitsiou playing RB for the entire season or Pelkas playing as the CAM either. They are not good enough to be in the best 11. At least not now anyway and I don't see it changing in the future. Ultimately, we want the backup players to be very close in quality to the best 11. But how can you compare Kitsiou to Matos or Pelkas to Biseswar ? As for Crespo, ti sou ekane re Yiankos, ha ha ? Last season I think he was our most consistent defender by a long shot. This season we can't comment as the whole squad has been rubbish.

Regardless of whether Kitsiou has improved or not, he's the only fit back up for Matos. From the moment he was loaned out, the club should've told Stoogeovic to get Konstantinidis fit and ready to at the very least provide a rotation option. Instead, Konstantinidis has barely played even in the practice games. I hope that Kitsiou and Charisis do a "Pelkas" and come back revitalized and changed as players. Similar to what happened to Pelkas when he went on loan to Portugal. Charisis has the potential to be much better, but there are times when he's lost in the middle and doesn't know how to get back into the game. Hopefully lots of game time will help.

Is this an imposter ? The kozi I know is not normally this positive! Regarding the team I think it all comes down to two factors. Firstly, the quality of the two midfield signings El Khadouri and Mauricio. If these two guys really are a step up from what we have, then we may actually have a proper midfield. Too often our team looks like it has defence and forwards with nothing in the middle. The second issue is quality/depth of our defence, which I believe is insufficient. Our first line of defence of Matos, Varela, Crespo, Leovac is good enough for the GSL, but the back up players I'm not so sure.

Loaning Kitsiou was a big vlakia. Charisis not so much as he wouldn't have got much game time.

You would like to think there is some sort of medium to long term plan to increase the revenue of the club outside of Savvidis putting in money each season. That is unsustainable. If he needs to put in say 10 million each season, how long can that go on for ? The whole idea is that he puts money in to make the team sustainable on it's own and then it can take care of itself. If Savvidis plan was to get CL money then that is a silly gamble. Even if we somehow got it one year, you can't rely on it. The loss of EL monies and half the season with no fans will hurt this year and Savvidis no doubt will have to pour money in to cover it. But moving forward the wages and structure in the club should be based around revenue that can be relied upon. Transfers are another matter as in theory you can try and sell to buy, but the wages themselves (which have increased massively in the last 2 seasons) need to be sustainable.

@jvc, stop talking about Olympiakos. They are in the stratosphere and we are rolling around in the dirt. They collect 20+ million most seasons from the CL. They sell players for 10 million that we would struggle to sell for 1/4 of that. We get on a roll of 3 wins and think we are something special. Seriously, we are comparing an F1 to a Zastava.

Regarding Vieirinha, malista, sothikame tora. Come play for the "fanela" my man. I know you love the club so much, that's why you've waited so long to come to the club. You could've come earlier in the season but that would make sense. I can't believe we're even entertaining this. As for Henrique, after this episode do we expect him to play for the "fanela" ? The whole point of buying him and Warda was to increase depth in the wing positions. He's still a good option off the bench and for rotation. He's also a good impact player. Sell him, fine, if we need the money as now we have Mak, but to sell him for Vieringa, good lord.

The financial hole is due to Financial Fair Play requirements. Savvidis can't just pour money in. It somehow needs to be "legitimate". I believe if he pours money in it either needs to show on the books as a loan or he needs to increase his share allocation. At least, that's my understanding of it.

Agree about the CB i.e. we should only get one if he's clearly better than Crespo/Varela. As for Mauricio, what sort of a player is he ? I'm not even sure how he'll be used in the team. El Khaddouri sounds like he'll be a number 8, so I imagine he will be rotated with Shakhov who seems to be out of sorts so far this season. We still need a solid number 6 to rotate with Canas. Someone who can really sweep in the middle and do the dirty work. Only Canas, when he's in form, does it properly. Cimirot is hit and miss in the role, so some backup there would be good. I'd give my left nut (figuratively speaking) for a Garcia type player who can just stamp his presence on a game.

Thanks bro xxx ooo ;) I hope Lucescu can get the fitness issue sorted out asap. He has 2 weeks, which sounds like it's not enough, but it's a start and gives him some time to at least get cracking on it. I find it incredulous that for a squad of professionals that is paid quite well, that such a situation was allowed to develop. I mean, it's not their fault, they just follow what the manager says, but it's football 101 to have your players fit. Talent you can't really teach. Tactics and decision making you can teach depending on the player. But fitness, that's easy. It's unforgivable to not have your players fit for the beginning of the season, doubly, no triply so, when you know you have life and death EL qualifiers. As for Lucescu, we will see what he is made of this season. I'm not sold on him in the way same way I wasn't sold on Ivic last season. Both were/are unknown quantities. We know what he achieved with Xanthi but their goals and the pressure is different for Xanthi and different for us. It's one thing when your goal is to be "hard to beat" and another when you are trying to play positively.

I know that patata. That's why I made my statement so lame, hoping you would expand on your "team needs a lot of work" statement.

I read we had 60% possession and 21 attempts on goal whereas Kerkyra had 4 attempts on goal. What more do you want ?!

Lamprou scores yet again. I'm beginning to think maybe we should have kept him in our squad and loaned out Koulouris instead.

I'll take a half baked Savvidis and Son over the years of old. I think we all forget how players would leave at the end of every season with out being paid. We forget how we were forced to sell players like Stafylidis and Vieirinha because we had debts to pay other players. We forget Salpi being forced to leave even though he wanted to stay because again they needed to sell him to pay debts. We forget how Malezas left the club not paid and as a favour he let it go and who knows how many others. They were terrible years. Savvidis is in it for himself. Who isn't ? Are any of the other owners any better. No one is happy with what happened this week, but trust me, if Savvidis left PAOK would fall to pieces very quickly. We are not, and have never been financially stable. Wages would drop back to 150K for most players and even they wouldn't be paid. As shitty as this elimination is, there is no way in f**king hell I want to go back to those days. We had good moments, proud moments, but lots of bad ones also. End of the day, the circus of hiring/firing TD's and managers has to end. Will it end ? Who knows. Ivic broke the record at just over a season. That says it all. I've said it before, we could hire Mourinho and we'd be asking for his head in a month. Off the field the teams lacks leadership, because the manager is new. Is Lucescu any good for PAOK ? Who f--king knows ? Only the gods. We'll find out soon enough. On the field the team lacks leadership also but I don't see how this can be fixed right away. You can't expect players we've signed to play "for the jumper". Let's be honest, most of them wouldn't have heard of PAOK 3 years ago. The only saving grace of this season so far is that we still have the core of players from last season which for us is a miracle. Normally we would've made 10 signings by now to appease the fans. The only person that can change the mentality of the players is the manager and right now he's been there two weeks. If I die and get to meet God or Zeus or Thor or whoever, and they said to me "You can ask one question and it will be answered", a normal person would ask something like "What is the meaning of life" or something like that. Instead I (because I'm a m-a-l-a-k-a) will ask "Why did Ivic really leave PAOK". Ase, eimaste yia klammata.

Hopefully Savvidis doesn't accept it. For myself, he's the best TD we've had and if you have a look at the players he's brought to the club, most were decent. Only Brkic has been a complete flop. The rest you can see there is something there. Now his job is to bring players to the team. It's not his job to train them, make sure they're fit, keep them motivated, keep them hungry, keep them scared. That's for others to do. Matos, Crespo, Canas, Shakhov, Biseswar, Campos, Prijovic, Henrique. These are players that have come to the team while he's been TD. Hardly crap players. They have their issues but it's not his role as TD to make sure they're at 100%. That's up to the manager. End of the day, until we get a manager with a*****A and a midfielder in the mold of Garcia who can be a real captain on the pitch, the team will struggle to stay motivated.

@PAOKSYD nice post.

What can I say ... PAOK is a team that gives ... χαρά ... not just to PAOK fans, but to Olympiakos, PAO and AEK fans also.

Losing Ivic was indeed a massive loss, and no one really understands why. But regardless, this squad could have gone out with no manager at all and should still have easily one. Goes to show the current disarray.

This is basically the same team that beat PAO 4-0 and played very well against Olympiakos both home and away. Say what you will but how they can drop their performance so much is a messed up. The club, knowing that they had play-offs should have the team fit and raring to go. Instead, we took our opposition lightly. A team who eliminated Galatasaray, has an artificial pitch (a huge advantage for them) and is fully fit being 20 rounds into their season. We just assumed we would qualify, because we always do. Yep, no worries. The worst aspect of all this is that we got thoroughly out played. It's one thing to dominate a game, create 20 chances and then the opposition score a lucky goal. It's another to be playing like gatakia against amateurs. Lucescu has a lot of work to do ...

Boston, regardless of the mistakes Savvidis has made and regardless of his neanderthal son (that always makes me laugh, ha ha) it's not as if Savvidis hasn't spent money on decent players. There is no way this squad should ever have been defeated by this team. The fact that the team has not played one good match since the Cup is ridiculous. The fact that the team is not fit is not acceptable. The only good thing that may come of this is that in future years we won't take "weak" opposition so lightly. We always assume we'll qualify. I figure the same belief is held by the team administration, coaches and players, even if they don't say it directly. Now, they can all go eat a bag of d--ks. I'm so angry that they let it come to this.

Congratulation to AEK who defeated a strong opponent. Congratulation also to Ouzounidis and PAO who always had an uphill battle against a very strong Bilbao team coupled with their financial difficulties. As for PAOK, rezili not only for themselves but for Greece who desperately need the points.

I've been wondering that myself but we won't really know for a while if the players are burnt out (which would be a big worry) or if they are just poorly prepared.