Olympiakos crowned again despite loss
Olympiakos won its ninth Greek league title in 10 years and 34th overall Sunday night despite a 2-1 loss to Larissa, claiming the crown when Iraklis beat Panathinaikos 1-0. The results left Olympiakos with 69 points, six ahead of AEK and eight in front of Panathinaikos with two games remaining. Olympiakos would still claim the title if AEK, which beat OFI 2-0 on Sunday, won its last two games and tied it on points, having won the season series between the two clubs. The title was Olympiakos’s second straight and gave it 15 more than its next closest rival, Panathinaikos, which won last won the league in 2004. The Piraeus club is also shooting for a back-to-back league-and-cup triumph. Olympiakos faces AEK in the cup final on May 6 on Crete. Angelos Digozis converted a penalty in the fifth minute and Stathis Aloneftis added the winner in the 57th for Larissa to spoil Olympiakos’s celebrations. Predrag Djordjevic converted off a cross by Yiannis Okkas in the 54th for Olympiakos’s only goal. Olympiakos had Jose Herrera to thank for its title after the 25-year-old Argentinean scored in the 33rd minute. AEK’s victory moved it past Panathinaikos into second place. Despite the club’s dominance in domestic soccer, Olympiakos has failed to rise to prominence in European club-level competition, which was the main factor behind the administration’s move to hire Norwegian Trond Sollied for the coaching job last summer in place of Dusan Bajevic, despite his impressive domestic record. The club will be hoping for greater impact in European competition in the new season. Last season, the Piraeus club narrowly missed out on advancing to the Champions League’s second stage after collapsing to eventual champion Liverpool at Anfield – 3-1 after going up 1-0 – in a concluding group game. Olympiakos subsequently slid from top spot to third in the group, despite accumulating a sturdy 10 points from six games. This season, Olympiakos earned just four points from its six group games in the Champions League’s first phase to end last in its group. As glum as this record may appear, the Greek club was not entirely disappointing. Olympiakos, which has yet to win away in the Champions League, came close to earning two valuable away draws – at least – against powerhouse group rivals Real Madrid and Olympique Lyonnais. But Olympiakos fell in the dying minutes after conceding late goals for 2-1 losses in both games. In the new season, Sollied and his administration will be looking to take the Greek club at least a step further in the Champions League. At rival camp Panathinaikos – where Sollied had been rumored as a possible acquisition for the coaching job about a year before he signed with Olympiakos – coach Alberto Malesani appears to be in hot water now that his team has dropped to third place, and out of Champions League territory, in the league standings. The Italian, who has traveled back and forth from his homeland for personal reasons since signing with the Athens club, had fallen out of favor among a considerable number of club fans earlier in the season, when it became apparent that arch rival Olympiakos was on the way to another league triumph. But the club’s administration backed Malesani as part of an attempt to view the coaching job as a long-term commitment. The situation, though, appears to have changed. The club’s administration has reportedly told the Italian that he will not be able to continue at Panathinaikos unless his personal issues are solved. Some pundits assert that even if the Italian’s need to keep traveling back and forth is resolved, his prospects of carrying on at Panathinaikos are bleak. (Kathimerini, AP)
