Ioannidis: “We believed in qualifying – I’m confident of hitting penalties at critical points”

For the great qualification of Panathinaikos in the playoffs Champions League spoke to the press representatives o Fotis Ioannidis.

The 24-year-old striker and golden scorer at the “Velodrome” referred to the great performance of his team, the mental reserves he showed after 2-0 but also the ability to take penalties at crucial points.

What Fotis Ioannidis said in detail:

On how unique what he has done is: “I consider it to be a huge qualification in which everyone from the team contributed, the players, the staff, everyone put in their… little stone. Both penalty kicks were important, of course, but we all managed it together.”

On the fact that he scored with a penalty both in normal time and in the process:

“The truth is that I have the self-confidence to score penalties at critical points as well. I showed that I think, because both of my performances were pretty good. We also had a disagreement regarding the penalty I would take during the process with Christos Kontis, because I told him I should take the last one, but he replied that we might never get there and that the first one is the most important and we want there a good performance. So I told him to make me hit that too”.

As to whether he has realized what they have achieved: “I think we have understood it, because we believed it before. The truth is that the game didn’t go particularly well at the beginning, it didn’t go as we had planned, but we knew that if the score stayed like this, we knew that at any moment we could find a goal and that’s what we finally achieved”.

For what it was that qualified: “It occurred to us that it was difficult to reverse this situation, the way it had been formed. But that’s where you need mental reserves, players with self-confidence and personality, which we have and we showed that in this match as well”.