“Olympiacos is the favorite to win the Europa League. Our goal is to qualify for the top six and enter directly into the qualifiers.”

Panathinaikos wraps up its preparations for the derby with Olympiacos (21:15, Novasports Prime and SPORT24 live) in the Euroleague premiere, with Ergin Ataman standing out in the heat that awaits in Ouaka, talking about the long-term goals for the Greens.

“Olympiacos is one of the biggest favorites to win the Europa League title. Last year they missed out on the title by a few seconds. We are a team with 11 new players, but we are a good team with strong personalities. We suffered a heavy defeat last week. The Super Cup final. Now we are playing at home and we have about 20 A thousand spectators, we will definitely fight for the match. It is definitely not an easy match. But it will not be an easy match for them either. Every coach wants to start the year against an easy opponent, but the draw was like this: This year we want to win all the matches at home.

During the pre-season, we played four games against Euroleague level teams and lost only one game, that to Fenerbahce. We won against Maccabi, Bayern and Efes. I think last week’s match in the Super Cup was completely different, but there is an important issue. In those matches we had a full roster, whereas now we won’t have Mitoglou and Papapetrou. We start the season without two very important players in their respective divisions. Since the season is long and all teams will face injuries, this is what happened to us at the beginning. This is ruining what we worked on in preparation, now I have to change some things.

The fans at OAKA will definitely give us a big incentive. When you play in that kind of atmosphere, you work harder. On the contrary, we should not get carried away and focus on basketball. We have to be conservative but smart because we are facing a very good opponent. We have to take advantage of our home ground and start the season with tickets sold out. “I hope this applies to all European matches, because our goal is not only to win Olympiacos, but to be in the top six at the end of the regular season to enter the playoffs.” Instructor Ataman reported in detail.