Injuries plague Olympiacos progress | OneFootball

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If you’re someone that watches a lot of football, you've probably noticed one thing: no matter how big your squad is or how rich your club is, injuries will always be a limitation on success. Manchester City would probably walk the Greek league even with 20 players missing but they can’t sustain their performances when some pieces are missing. The same applies to Real Madrid, or even your local club, the one you’re playing in.

So, why wouldn't it be the case with Olympiacos ? Yes, we are a big club, we’re fresh off winning our first European trophies in the UEFA Conference League and the UEFA Youth League. All of that is true. We also lost some key players during the summer but not even the best coach in the world could easily deal with so many players getting injured, either in training or during games or during international breaks!

Better days will come

And that’s something we constantly need to have in mind. One of the pillars of last season, Panagiotis Retsos, missed the first two months and that cost us points. Mendilibar used Ntoi (a defensive midfielder) as a defender, and when Retsos came back along with Carmo, that issue was solved. What happens next ? Carmo gets injured. So Pirola steps up and you'd think the defence is sorted. But you also have to deal with Ortega getting injured without any backup but Apostolopoulos. Then Rodinei misses a derby, and Costinha steps in.

Overall, Olympiacos look sorted at the back. And that’s a good thing because when Mouzakitis came in, the midfield got better, more balanced. That allowed Dani Garcia to be better but… then Hezze and Chiquinho picked up injuries. On top of that, Gelson was doing very well up front with Kostoulas and El Kaabi… but he got injured too ! How can Mendilibar be able to sort things out when he can’t even have a full squad for a single week ? Yes, we should have done better in Romania as we should have done better during that first part of the Superleague season.

But at some point, we need to take a little step back and think of the bigger picture : when Retsos, Carmo, Pirola, Ortega, Rodinei, Chiquinho, Yazici, Hezze, Gelson, Willian and even Masouras, aka the definition of a reliable player, get injured, it’s because something’s not working. Topping the league with only one loss in Europe appears to be a miracle for me. We owe that to the work thats been done in the academy over the past years and to Mendilibar who has somehow still managed to find solutions in the midst of all this.

Yaremchuk, another example

Reading that might not convince you on my point. But when Yaremchuk cames on in Bucharest, he almost scored with his first touch. And playing against wrestlers like that could have suited his playing style. But he literally broke his nose on the first chance he had to deal with… and he gets criticized on top of this ! How can people actually blame both Velde and Willian that much when they came in with a two strikers system that changed when Yaremchuk was subbed of ? Oliveira came in for 10’ and you would think, by reading people’s opinion, that he put on a kind of performance like Leali back in the day.

I’m not even debating the summer signings. Personally, I still think decent business was done with Pirola and Costinha (even if signed in January) and even Dani Garcia that seems transformed. I’m not writing off Velde yet and Willian is not even a disappointment to me because of one thing : the guy seems to be playing with the constant fear of getting injured. I might be wrong because I'm not at Renti every week but he’s not known to be a tourist. But when you look at him, it’s obvious he’s holding back. He surely knows he can’t afford any injury on top of those sustained since joining. So, that’s lead us to one conclusion : being frustrated is logical. But we were coming from two horrible Europa League campaigns before winning the Conference League (with no injury at that time, what a surprise !). We can’t be blinded by that trophy. We’re still a recovering team in Europe but we've lost only one game to Lyon, that has far better individual players. We’re still on track. But we can’t progress that much if we keep picking up injuries. That’s why football is the simplest sport ever. Beautiful, yes, but also very simple sometimes.

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