5 European Cups for the Emperor of Europe

Basketball... The national sport of Greece. How many moments of glory this sport has given us and how many we expect in the years to come. And if we want to talk about a certain team, there's no other than Panathinaikos.

 

The Euroleague's Final-4 (equal to football's Champions League) took place in Berlin, with Panathinaikos, CSKA Moscow, Barcelona and our bitter rivals of Olympiakos. And it couldn't have been a better start... Last Friday we managed to beat Olympiakos in the semi-final. The omens weren't with us, since  in our previous 2 semi-finals against Olympiakos (about 10 years ago) we got defeated by them.

 

This time it wasn't about omens, it was about the heart. We dominated the game from the very start, we just wanted to add a little spark in the end, letting them believe they can do it in the end :P

 

 

And the same thing happened against the Russians (I wonder how many Russian players are in their team) of CSKA Moscow. We were 48-28 ahead in half-time, with possibly our best performace this season. How could this game change its fate ? Only from the mighty referees. They started awarding ridiculous fouls on us, not awarding the ones they should do to CSKA and slowly but steadily CSKA started narrowing the gap. Finally, with about 5 secs to go, the ball went to Siskauskas but Nicolas wouldn't let him take the shot unmarked. The Lithuanian missed the 3-pointer... The rest are history...