By Eurohoops Team/ info@eurohoops.net
Panathinaikos lost for the first time this season in the Greek Basket League, falling at home to Aris after 16 consecutive wins.
The head coach of the Greens Ergin Ataman wasn’t pleased after the game, mostly due to the schedule.
“This is ridiculous. After a double week, we play at five o’clock in the league. How can you prepare your players and concentrate on league matches? There is no time. With an investment of 25-30 million in basketball, we play at 5 pm on a working day. We don’t have the home advantage, and there’s insufficient time to prepare and stay focused on the game. From then on, everything was terrible. My players were terrible, my coaching was terrible, the referees were terrible, and we lost the match. Congratulations to everybody who thought of scheduling the match on Monday at five in the afternoon,” Ataman said.
On the other hand, Panathinaikos owner Dimitris Giannakopoulos had a different approach. He emphasized that the Aris deserved the victory and mentioned that if PAO won, he would ask for a replay.
“If we won in the end, I’d ask for the game to be played again. I think that Manchester did that years ago because they won with a bogus penalty and they asked for the game to be played again.
It’s not possible for Aris to come here, and play great basketball, we are “dead,” tired, indifferent, I don’t know which, and we just “have to” win because the referees are in favor of us.
It’s not possible that last year, or the year before, for Olympiacos to finish the regular season in the first place due to a foul on the road that referee Tsaroucha didn’t call.
It’s not possible that in this year’s game of Olympiacos vs. Peristeri, an Olympiacos player sends the ball out of bounds and she [Tsaroucha] says that Peristeri sent the ball out of bounds.
To not talk only about Olympiacos, it’s not possible for the referees to really want Panathinaikos to win today. We were worse; we had to lose,” Giannakopoulos said.