By Nikos Varlas
Greece has more serious problem to solve than to organize a basketball cup final, but it’s a universal law of life that the sports proceedings of a country can be the mirror of its society.
In Saturday will be held the fifth straight Greek cup final between Panathinaikos and Olympiacos, something that must be a Guinness world record! There is draw, but for five straight seasons the two teams have NEVER met in the quarter finals or the semi finals. If you do the math in order to find the odds for this occurrence, it is below 10%.
But as you know in Greek logistics, anything can happen. Only in Greece! Of only this is not the strangest thing of the story. It is unthinkable for the common mind, but the final will be held between two of the top teams in Europe for the fifth straight time in the same court of Elliniko with primitive conditions.
Every team will get just 900 tickets, in a court of 8.000 seats, every spectator must give to the police his id to order to get a ticket, he will have a police escort to the court from a fixed entry point and the doors will be closed 45 minutes before the jump-ball. If you have a ticket and you are late, you just miss the “party”!
In the country that gave birth to the Olympic ideal, which created the biggest sports event of the world in 1896 and organized the Olympics in 2004, there is NO authority capable of organizing a cup final in a full gym!
There is a ping pong game of responsibility that lasts for five year and the whole format of the cup is one of the worst in basketball advanced Europe. Panathinaikos and Olympiacos needed just two wins in order to get to the final and play in a “war zone” in front of 1.800 people.
It sounds bad and it is bad. If you compare it to the implicit sport civilization of other countries, it is almost depressing. In the Spanish final eight, Real Madrid won the cup in the final against Barcelona, playing in the city of the opponent, in the beautiful hill of Montjuic. The gym was packed with fans of all the eight teams. It is something vested and gives glamor to the cup.
In Greece something similar will be science fiction! Even the Euroleague MVP for 2011 and Panathinaikos’s star Dimitris Diamantidis said in the official press conference: “We are not ready for a final in a full gym”! In Italy there was also a final eight, that was held in Torino and it was a basketball celebration.
In Turkey Besiktas won the second trophy of its basketball history, the first one after 1975, again in a final eight that was held in Conya. And in Greece the scenery is similar to an ancient Greek tragedy. But the play has a great weakness. Everybody knows the end and the… scenario from the last four seasons! What else you can do to prove that you are incompetent.
“If we did a step forward last year, now I feel that we go back ten steps. Why everybody must be in the gym 45 minutes before the start of the game? Why the doors will be closed after that? What will I tell to my wife and to my child that they want to see the final? They will feel like they are going to a prison and not a game”, said Olympiacos’s coach Dusan Ivkovic again in the official press conference. Thank God, there was no police there!
But in the year 2012 Athens is not Barcelona, Torino, or Conya. The Turkish teams failed in Euroleague, but they have full gyms, a civilized audience and the interest for basketball is higher than ever. In Greece it’s the complete opposite, even thought the national team is one of the top teams in the world the last decade and the clubs are full of European success. What is going wrong?
Well, the word in Greece is conium. This is what happening in Greece’s society and sports. Conium is a poison (Socrates drunk it) but the word is produced from the verb “konao” (in Geek: κωνάω) that means stir. Unfortunately the poison is everywhere in Greece and the pot is stirred.