Εβδομάδα Είναι … Και Κυλάει

It’s been a while since the evdomada.net site has been updated but what a story to come back to?

Ellas has given its football fans another great day to remember. The 0-1 result for Ellas was enough to grant them a ticket to their 2nd ever FIFA World Cup appearance in South Africa next year.

For the Greek-Australians amongst us, it will be the first tournament with both nations competing at the FIFA World Cup. It will be double the excitement of having 2 teams to follow that will hopefully give all their best.

For the Ellas team, after a very boring first-leg match in Athens on the weekend, they had to get a result away in the cold Ukraine city of Donetsk. Many of us were still hopeful although we also understood how difficult it could be to win away. It was a disciplined performance by Ellas and in particular the man of the match in my opinion, goalkeeper Alexandros Zorbas, who managed to stop the Ukrainians scoring on more than one occassion.

It’s our second FIFA World Cup appearance, however our last tournament at USA 1994 is one that most of us try to forget … painfully. We had 3 losses and didn’t manage to even score a single goal. Let’s hope this time we can at least score a goal (hopefully more than 1) and maybe we can hope for a win??

Australia is appearing in its third FIFA World Cup; back-to-back in fact after a good performance in the last FIFA World Cup tournament at Germany.

And our neighbours New Zealand will also be in their second tournament. The All Whites defeated Bahrain over the 2-leg knockout. Technically this will be the first tournament with 2 Oceania teams being present – although Australia is now in the Asian confederation.

Now we wait for the draw for the groups and who we will be lucky enough to be drawn against.

My friend Michael had a very interesting group scenario. Imagine this group: Italy, Greece, Australia & New Zealand!

One can only imagine what would happen in the cities of Sydney and Melbourne … and Bondi for the All White supporters!