At this week’s games in Greek championship all the favorites manage to easily beat their opponents. Only 19 sets needed to be played for 6 different games on the quicker round of the last years.
All the favorites easily won with the same score 3-0. Panathinaikos beat Epikouros (25-22, 25-14, 25-21), Iraklis beat Kalamaria (25-22, 25-19, 25-21), Olympiakos beat Kifisia, PAOK beat Aris (25-21, 25-22, 25-23) and Lamia beat Panellinios (25-21, 25-22, 25-16). Only in Alexandroupoli needed to play the forth set where the local team of Ethnikos won 3-1 over EAPatron.
It was a round with no surprises and few quality matches. The best team of this round was Andrey Zhekov (setter from Olympiakos), Ivan Raic (the Croatian diagonal from Ethnikos Alexandroupolis), Rafael Lins and Yiannis Mantekas (outside hitters from PAOK and EAP), Dimitrios Gramatikakis (middle blocker from Ethnikos Alexandroupolis) and Chris Dimitrakopoulos (libero from PAOK). The MVP of 4th round was the Brazilian Rafael Lins from PAOK who scored 17 point in the local derby against Aris.
Although Olympiakos managed to win for the first time in this championship last’s season champion still got many problems to be solved. In the same position Panathinaikos had economical problems and his coach mister Kazaris is ready to resign. EAPatron’s coach Xristopoulos is searching for one or two foreign players because the total performance of four Brazilians are lower that he expected.
In Thessaloniki Iraklis team decided to continued with Freddy Brooks as the main coach after the two last wins in a row. The team with fewer problems seems to be PAOK whose coach Yiannis Melkas is trying to explain to his players that they must keep working hard if they want to continue leading the Greek championship.
