georgelaz

guys Samaris is crucial. Only because I don't want to change my avatar. lol jks but yes he should be a box to box katsourani is his prime type player!

left footed and killer shot. I think he'll take a while to settle though and we have no margin for error now.

oof kone would be terrible on the wing. he has a better cross than kareli but less pace and his shooting is best when it's front on. we have a winger crisis

I don't. but if he's going to start that's where he'd be useful. he'd wouldn't be useful anywhere else really. fortounis however can do well in lcm. someone else on here was wanting him to play deeper as a playmaker, as well. in order to maximize the best out of all our players collectively, might be a good move.

if kone becomes a starter, he should be the cf/cam. fortounis should be slotted in LCM .

wales was a joy to watch. in tournament style games, any team can win because only 90 minutes of magic is needed so might as well get everyone involved = more surprises. I think Europe should be expanded to two top teams and third playoff rounds for the world cup. That extra round will have a lot of teams go far that wouldn't otherwise. heck, portugal benefited from the extra round and won the whole euro. they wouldn't have made it past knockouts in traditional format. goes to show you how fine the margin is in tournament football.

the thing is, if anyone is going to get points off belgium, it's us. bosnia plays more attractive football but they're never going to have our pedigree because defense wins championships unless your spain or brazil type caliber. so people talk smack about our ethniki, but numbers don't lie. (besides that hickup euro campaign, which hopefully we can slowly forget)

this is the problem with the serbian alliance. serbs are definitely cool to us, but they're hot heads and they put us into messes that we've transcended long ago. Greece is definitely more enlightened than the rest of the balkans, hence why we're more akin Western Europe eg) Portugal. If fans brought provactive signs to a Germany vs. Greece match we'd just taunt each other and raise the drama for the game. Serbs and Bosnians have a lot of losers and criminals around though and murdering and stabbing is blase and casual to them. I hope nobody gets hurt.

most of our strikers seem to struggle at the NT level until after a lot of caps. Vellios and Diamantakos haven't looked any better than Klaus.

kolossos that's a good idea. and dean don't be a dick. I openly say which fifa line ups i use but I'm not one dimensional and I watch a lot of greek soccer. bakasetas and kone are very similar players. bakaseta has a better first touch and interplay, kone is better in virtually everything else. been following our nt and greek superleague till just before our euro win. also fifa is pretty spot on with their ratings although some people bitch about them. if you take a peak at them. http://www.futhead.com/17/nations/greece/ also mantalos/kaltas didn't get on fifa until way later and I commended his play. I could only know that cause I watch superleague. you can get highlights too on novasports

we can really get a draw against belgium if we stay focused. very exciting campaign.

also I think Kone should have a presence in our NT. At least as a super sub. He plays regular in Italy for years now. Inserting Bakasetas they're kinda like the same player. Although Bakasetas is a cool last name and nice eyes. But they're both slowish for a forward, decent finishers, cf/mids.

one of the things I was thinking about is the obvious that coaches have favourites. for Skibbe = Tzavellas since his Frankfurt connection. (Possibly also Tsanas) Santos = Holebas, possibly because of the latin element. (Also one of our most willing coaches to ignore the rest of EPO?) Holebas was prominent for us when Santos was the selector 2010-2014.

yes this is true. If you actually did a dna sample you'd see that a lot of turks are heavily greek genetically. the greeks that remained greeks are the stubborn one's that stick to their principles. the more mercenary ones became turks because they could essentially buy back their freedom by becoming one of them. sooooo many ethnic greeks with names like mehmet ozturk even as far as the 1800s-1900s

also what's the attendance in Greece? I know this is spoken of but Olympiakos game 30k+ vs. Ethiniki 15k? That's a joke right? Our NT is quite better than any Greek club. I think it might be an Athenian thing, cause when I was in Kalamata the bars were packed for ethniki games. I got deja vu when someone referred to this "The first thing he taught us was that the national team had to come first," says Fyssas. Greek football is fiercely partisan; so closely did players identify with Olympiakos, Panathinaikos and AEK, the country's three club giants, that forgetting tribal enmity and uniting behind the blue-and-white flag had always proved difficult. "Rehhagel insisted that everything else came after the national team." In qualifying for 2004, the impact was impressive. Greece did not lose for 15 games. They won in Spain. Under Rehhagel's guidance, they strolled to a place in Portugal and along the way, they developed a formidable spirit. "It was more like a family," says Fyssas. "It was not one of these national teams with 55 players. We had 20 or so who were always in the squad -- he would bring two or three more along to have a look at them -- and so we were very close. We would sacrifice everything for each other."

sokratis also saved us a probable goal on their part where he pitpocketed dzeko he's a beast too mayn, even the best defenders make mistakes and he was making dangerous runs too. sokratis gives 200% for the ethiniki.

our midfield took a vacation. Samaris and Mantalos have been great players for us in the past and they had a bad night from what I saw. Pretty invisible. Fortounis was great. Almost scored from that cracker. He's always good whenever he plays.

yeah greek players as a general temperament are pretty lazy but when you push the guys we get vicious. eg) when we lost to faroe islands but because of the bad blood between turkey we would not let them win.

if you look at our record against them, it's us who beat them 4-0. They only beat us that 3-1 once and we still beat them in the group so you guys are giving them way more respect than they deserve.

kpaps really showed his age when losing his intelligence. emotional intelligence tends to develop more as we get older. look at Mitroglou now and his punk days. (I do miss his redicolous celebrations at times though lol)

that's a blow. but it's a bigger handicap to them if dzeko gets the same penalty

I disagree highly that the ref was biased. if anything there should have 10+ minutes extra time at the end with 8 yellows on their end. Bosnia is definitely not better than us. Yeah they play more attractive football but at the end of the day we're just as talented. Defense ain't pretty. If we had Fetfa and Holebas on the wings, we could make them look stupid, but alas, Politics.

after educating myself more on the bosnian team I would say we're about equal. They have in offense what we have in defense. Us not having Manolas is the equivalent to them not having Pjanic. So we were handicapped. They might argue they were missing another key player but so were we (Holebas). I have many Bosnian friends so the fact that those Serbian fans brought those posters gloating genocide makes me feel so embarrassed. Yes, as Greeks we were enslaved by Turkish muslims for 300 years or so but I'd rather not stoop to their level. Nor do I think we have the ability to stoop that low if we wanted to. Bosnia is a super small country with a long memory cause nothing ever really happens there. So you can bet your booty that the environment in Zenica will be hostile as hell.

I wonder how many greeks are still polytheistic. and the one's that are, how many actually remained that way from ancient times or converted back to it. there are villages as far as india which are remnants of ancient macedonians that are polytheistic still eg) dionysis the god of wine.

there is definitely general warm feelings between greeks and serbs. much like how there's warm feelings towards bosniaks and turks. if Greece was having a crisis, it would be the Serbs that would likely open their boarders to us over the Turks imo. There's always group preferences in general, let's be real. most people can't be bothered to even bring their nations flag around, let alone a philonation. people are lazy, group preferences are real.