Alessio Lisi took responsibility for PAOK’s loss to Kalamata at Toumba during a press conference.
The Italian coach emphasized that “it’s my fault,” but also noted that his team’s performance was unacceptable, describing the Thessaloniki side’s first-half showing as “unacceptable.”
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Here is what he said in detail:
On the day off he gave the team and whether he regretted it: “I don’t regret anything. We don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t given them the day off. I have no problem saying that I am the one responsible for today’s performance. There’s no need for many words—today’s performance is unacceptable.”
On whether he didn’t “read” Kalamata correctly, especially mentally: “I agree with what you’re saying. Our opponents did something very different, and we weren’t able to figure them out. The team didn’t show much of what it had been showing before the break—that’s my mistake. We didn’t prepare properly last week. Our performance in the first half was unacceptable; I’m very upset with how we played today.”
On the game plan involving Entiaye: “I don’t agree that we played too many balls to Serif. We didn’t have the depth on the field to play better. Maybe in the last ten minutes of the game we played with deep passes, but that wasn’t our game plan.”
On the reason for substituting Michailidis: “The reason was the minor niggles he was experiencing. He asked me to take him out in the 37th minute, but I told him to hang in there until halftime.”
On what needs to change: “We’ll definitely sit down and reflect on a lot of things from the past week so we can get back to the form we showed in our last few matches.”
On Elustondo and the fans’ boos: “I have no comment. If someone feels the need to react at the stadium, then they can do so. Aritz is an experienced player with a long career, so he was able to play through it. We need to support him; it wasn’t his best game. But if anyone says we lost because of him, that’s the wrong way to look at the game. We all lose together, and today it’s my fault.”
On Vargas: “We’d talked about him; he’s their best player. We need to analyze the moments when he caused us problems. There were 3–4 moments where we need to figure out what went wrong.”
*photo source: KYPE
