georgelaz

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.

In many ways, GrkCdn22 is the Tzavella of our forum lol

I can't really see fortounis doing too well abroad for some reason. even though I'm a fan. I think bundesliga is the best bet though. england would be a nightmare.

torosidis is underrated in my opinion. i prefer sokratis as captain though. the next bosnia match will likely be as hostile as the poli game.

didn't see that. he has hot head tendencies for sure. maniatis and tzavellas are like that too. whereas sokratis, fortounis, karelis tend to be cool as cucumbers.

pretty sure that was probably serbs. most greeks have no idea what that even means, I had to google it.

it didn't look like he did ANYTHING. He was just protesting that Dzeko should get a red.

we can kinda play good attacking balla when our hand is forced eg) vs. ivory coast and romania here's the goalara by mr. tsabouka. was that mr. mykonos with the assist?

yeah I'm very happy with our position. with manolas back to our backline will be beefed up. will we beat belgium? probably not. can we get a draw? definitely maybe.

mantalos and samaris have been amazing other matches I give them the benefit of the doubt that it was an off day really. best players were sokratis, fortouni, torosidis, gianniota (should have started was a catalyst to the goal) our worst players were samaris and mantalos

I was saying that mitro = dzeko. I was saying that because I was thinking that dzeko was on a decline but after watching that I concede I was wrong. dzeko was really amazing out there besides the loss of dicipline but sokratis also showed what an amazing player is when he pitpocketed dzeko on the near goal in the box.

I actually really like skibbe's selections for the match. almost the best we could do under the circumstances. I like tzavellas and given the manolas injury he makes sense at the back. he also came in handy that we had an extra CB because of the kpaps red. Which was totally underdeserved. We could have even gotten a win. Their goalie saved them a lot.

mr. tzabouka tzavellas himself! GOAL!