By Nikos Varlas/ varlas@eurohoops.net
As the Croatian coach said in the press conference after the game: “Today this is a big victory for us in order to stay on the Final Four race. If we were defeated, mentally everything would be difficult”.
Still Perasovic doesn’t think that anything will be easy: “Olympiacos is a great team and they play the same on the road. So the fact that we will now face them at home doesn’t change much. It will be difficult to beat Olympiacos three times, but now we have our possibilities. We stopped their offensive rebounds, we stopped their fast breaks but we couldn’t stop their outside shooting. In the end we were also a bit lucky, but you have to have luck in order to win in a gym like this”.
On the other side, coach Giannis Sfairopoulos believes that his team can get a road win and turn things around: “We allowed only 14 points in the second and 14 in the third period, we had a lot of chances to get a big lead, we got a seven points advantage, but we were not really concentrated. They came back in the game and in the end we missed some shots and some free throws, still the most important thing was that we didn’t have the chance to get some easy transition points. We lost the home court advantage, but we have proven that we can play in any court. This is the moment to continue fighting and we must be mentally strong in order to fight in the two upcoming games. Milutinov hurt his knee during the game, that’s why he wasn’t used in the rest of the game. I would like to thank the fans, I am sorry that we didn’t give them the win”.