Hellas Football

Olympiakos vs Fenerbahce: Europa League Match Day 5 Preview By Stephen Kountourou  After what felt like a mercifully short yet disappointing international break, club football is back and so it shall stay for the rest of the calendar year until March 2022. Just as excitingly continental club football also makes its return as all three of UEFA’s major competitions are now in the latter part of the group stages. A few sides have already sealed their fate with two games to spare, whether that is a qualification to the knockout stages, dropping into a lower tier competition or even being dumped out of European football altogether.  Greek champions Olympiakos is currently on the precipice of either recovering their European campaign and finishing in the top two, finishing third and resigning themselves to Europa Conference League football or the most unlikely outcome being that they finish bottom of Group D. After a very poor doubleheader against Frankfurt, in which 1st place was t...

Conference League: Slovan Bratislava vs PAOK Preview By Michael Vissini European football returns for PAOK with Matchday 5 of the Conference League set to premiere Thursday night, with PAOK on the road to Slovakia to face Slovan Bratislava, further classified as a “final” Lucescu’s men have completed their preparations for the upcoming clash with the focus on refining set pieces during training, but the Romanian will be without Douglas Augusto and Vieirinha due to injuries and Giannis Michailidis suspended for three European games. It is simple to understand the scenario in order for PAOK to qualify for the Round of 32; a win against Slovan, it is practically automatic qualification given the final fixture is at Toumba against minnow side Lincoln Red Imps of Gibraltar. Heading into this encounter, Slovan are the in-form side with the Slovakians 12 games unbeaten since 26th September (11 wins, 1 draw), whereas PAOK on the other hand have been inconsistent but problems lie deeper given t...

Same mistakes keep costing us By Greg Gavalas Another campaign under head coach John van’t Ship has ended in the same way the last one has, in disappointment for the Greek National Team. It’s rather incredible how when John van’t  Ship (JVS) took over, we started playing nice football under him to where we have ended up today, with another draw against the mighty Kosovo, capping off Project Qatar as nothing more than a big failure. It posses the question and debate on everyone’s lips and fingers the last few weeks or months about JVS’ future, does he stay or does he go? It’s pretty clear now that we need to look at a new direction given the way the UEFA Nations League (UNL) campaign went, where we couldn’t top a group consisting of Slovenia, Kosovo and Moldova, in that campaign we couldn’t beat Slovenia and only beat Kosovo once thanks to a winning goal from Dimitris Siovas, at that point our best Centre Back by some way, what happened next?  Siovas was excluded from the Ethni...

Olympiakos vs Frankfurt:   Europa League Match Day 4 Preview Time for Revenge? By Stephen Kountourou  It’s return leg time for all clubs competing in Europe. This is now crunch time for many teams, who will be hosting the opponents they previously travelled on the road to on Match Day 3, and there are a couple of groups that could more or less be decided by the time the final whistle blows to end Match Day 4. Many eyes from Greece will particularly be focusing on the two Super League representatives in both the UEL and UECL respectively as both Olympiakos and PAOK fight to take control of their destiny at the top of their groups.  The Greek Champions themselves host Frankfurt in Piraeus, with the hope of righting the wrongs of the away trip to Germany. Unlike the previous encounter, Thrylos needed to show much more than they did previously against the Bundesliga side, after being very much the second best team on the night in a dower 3-1 defeat. A victory for Olympiakos w...