-On what went wrong: “I will give you a straightforward answer: what we did not do well today was that we did not take advantage of our opportunities, we did not score and we offered our opponent the chance to score the most goals.”
-On whether the squad shows signs of fatigue during the last 25 minutes of the match: “I believe that in both legs we tried to kick off the match dynamically and aggressively and that this continuous effort to attack all the time resulted in the spending of lots of energy. And in particular in tonight’s match when we did not have control because we counter-attacked after an attack and so on. This effort really leads to fatigue and tiredness. This is the reason for the lack of energy in the last minutes. As regards whether this is due to the physical condition, I will only say that if we look back at the beginning of the year and how demanding the UEFA Champions League schedule is, we can see that the team can handle successive matches. So, if we go back at the beginning of the season, we will realise that this is not due to the poor physical condition of the players. It is due to the kind of matches, such as tonight’s match, where you need to play quickly and demandingly from the very first minute of the game. This is my opinion – I don’t know whether it’s right or wrong. It’s my analysis of the situation. We sometimes see that the team can usually handle such matches; we had also seen some years ago with Manchester the amount of energy required since the very first minute.”
-On whether the handling of the roster should be different from now on: “It’s clear that this is a bad night for us. We are disappointed and this is obvious in the dressing room. My opinion and my ambition is to put this result behind us as soon as possible. We must look at the future no matter how disappointed we are. We have an important match this Sunday because if we win it, then we clinch the title. We are professionals. We also have a difficult match to play on Wednesday. A competition may be over, but we still have another two to go. We must show our character. We have a strong character as a team and we must prove this in the following matches.”
-On whether the team appeared unable to handle the match following the injury of Durmaz: “I agree. After Durmaz left the pitch, we were forced to reshuffle the players on the field. Fortounis left his position, where he played really well, and it was not the way we started the match. We were not able to regain the footing we had at the beginning.”
-On whether he is troubled by the fact that Olympiacos has difficulties scoring in the last few matches and whether this is due to the psychology: “Before concluding the interview, I would like to thank the fans both for their behaviour during the match as well as for the way they accepted the result at the end. As regard the match against AEK, I want to say that this was an odd match. We did not have the chance to create opportunities. We conceded a goal from a penalty kick and played with nine players. As regards the two matches against Anderlecht, the fact that we could not score when we had seven typical opportunities, is troubling. On the contrary, we allowed the opponent to score. We will discuss and analyse all these things with the players. It’s an overarching problem. The fact that we had seven typical scoring opportunities in two European matches and we only scored one goal, is troubling.”
