Diego Martínez, the coach of Olympiacos, appeared satisfied with his players’ effort and the 2–0 victory over Panserraikos in “G. Karaiskakis,” at the premiere of the championship.
In detail, the press conference of the Spanish coach of Olympiacos:
Apart from the win, what else is staying with you from the match?
First of all, I would like to congratulate our players for their effort, because when you start the championship with success, you feel confident. It was a challenging week, because of the trip and a game against a difficult opponent. We are happy with our qualification, but it is still early on, and we have players who are with us for a short time, and it is difficult for them to adapt and play in many matches. So, the conditions before the game were already difficult. I believe that our intention to win and score is clear; we wanted to score sooner. Against an opponent with a narrow and good defense, what is difficult in these games is to score the first goal. We had 22 attempts, but we only scored twice. It would have been better if we had scored earlier on, that’s what we wanted, so the pressure came as time went on and were failing during our final attempt. However, we had a good attitude during the game, the players kept their patience and perseverance, and managed to score.
In the second half, Olympiacos boosted their performance, is this due to your instructions or changes? Did you expect Gustavo Scarpa to be so good in his debut?
In football, what matters most is accuracy and success in order to score goals. This is how success will come about. This is what we lacked in the first half, and we corrected it with the help of the changes we made and not only; we corrected our accuracy and realized that this is what we lacked as time went on. It’s hard when players only know each other for a short time. When you say that Scarpa is good, this is also due to others’ behavior. Scarpa may have performed well, but this is also attributable to the help of his teammates. So, we keep working. We definitely need to improve – this will take time. What we clearly lack is to work on our final effort and this will come about with accuracy, in order to show our quality. In general, we need to “feed” on our successes; winning is important and pushes us to keep working.
Have you settled on the full-backs for Thursday? Since you won’t have Rodinay at your disposal.
We tried to distribute the minutes of participation in tonight’s match, which was quite important. We had to pick the players who were in good shape and not take any risks, so that we would be fresher later on for an important game we have in a few days. For now, we need to rehabilitate for one day and plan Thursday’s game. We need to present our identity, but to also consider which players are ready to perform better for Thursday. Without, of course, as we said before, taking any injury risks. We will make our decisions using all these elements. We are looking forward to Thursday’s game and to seeing a full stadium again, because our people are an important element for us, and they give us the strength to improve. We have a qualification in our pocket, we won the premiere 2–0, and all this is giving us an appetite for work and for Thursday’s match.
