Ivan Kolev

In Glyfada last night, Olympiakos made a significant step towards winning this year’s Volleyball Championship in Greece with victory with 3:0 (22:25, 20:25, 27:29) against Panathinaikos. This victory of the red-whites gave a huge psychological advantage to the team. Obviously in better form, Anders Christiansen’s team did not leave any hopes to the green ones.

The first third of the game started without the usual “getting to know each other,” because both teams know each other very well. During the most parts of the game, Olympiakos’ players controlled the field. Ever since the beginning of the game, Anders Christiansen’s team bet on the aggressive strategy, with Vasilis Kourneta and Milkovich. This made the green’s game harder when receiving the ball. The red-white’s we definitely the more mature team and with a diverse attack and defense game, they reached to expected 22:25.

During the second part of the game, Panathinaikos made some player changes and the quality of the game improved. In the first minutes of the game, with strong initial hits of Agamez, the green ones took the lead with 4:0. The long start quickly vanished with some consecutive mistakes of the green team, which gave an opportunity to Olympiakos to break the score to 4:4. With a more diverse game and pressure from the Pierian team was dominating and the second third ended with a 20:25 score.

The third part was started with the stormy play of the visitors and for a little while the result reached 6:1. For a second, whatever they could have been thinking was going to go wrong…The green ones made more risky first hits, they were making more surprising decisions in their attacks, they managed to turn around the game and this led to a result of 17:17. They even managed to take the lead with 21:20 but their strength ended there.

With a more diverse and interesting to watch game, Anders Christiansen’s team achieved a very important victory, which brought them two steps away from the prize. The next game, between the two teams, will be next Thursday (April 30^th) in Rendi.

Panathinaikos: Psarras, Agamez, Andrae, Herpe, Andreadis, Pantaleon, Stefanou, Depestele, Ntonas, Chatziantoniou, Ace, Lappas

Olympiakos: Kournetas, Milkovich, Rivera, Djuric, Hoff, Papadimitriou, Karipidis, Christofidelis