Day 9, Group A – Vouliagmeni (GRE) v Olympiacos Piraeus (GRE) 6-14
In the sixth round, Olympiacos thrashed Vouliagmeni 14-6 – though for three periods it was a somewhat balanced match, the favourites had an 8-5 lead before staging a 6-1 rout in the fourth. This time the Greek champion ‘brought forward’ that 6-1 run for the second period to kill all excitements by halftime.
Olympiacos took a slow start, netted their first goal only after six and a half minutes – though they defended well, so Vouliagmeni could score only once. At 1-1, Nikolaos Papasifakis’ penalty was well saved by Marko Bijac, and 14 seconds later Alexandros Papanastasiou hit one from action for 1-2 with 0:35 on the clock.
Soon it turned out that this miss hit back badly on Vouliagmeni as Olympiacos kicked off the second quarter in devastating mood. In a span of two minutes, they scored two actions goals, killed two man-downs in between, then a bit later in 31 seconds they added two more for 1-6. Vouliagmeni were done, even though they pulled one back to halt an almost 12-minute-long scoreless phase, but Olympiacos managed to score twice, this time in 41 seconds, shortly before the middle break for 2-8.
Despite Vouliagmeni could put up a brave fight in the two sides previous domestic encounter to force a draw – this time they were far from making a similar upset. They had a better spell when they netted three connecting goals after 2-9, but Olympiacos quickly overcame these problems by scoring two and again killing two man-downs to enjoy a calm final period, starting from 5-11. At the end the Piraeus side managed to copy-paste the very same result as they produced on Day 6.
Some stats really told the difference – the number of shots on goal stood 13-21 at the end, and Olympiacos also handled the marking of Vouliagmeni’s two best shooters extremely well which left Kapotsis (0/5) and Troulos (0/4) without a single goal.
