Itoudis: “Injury doesn’t stop us, is there a reason why teams don’t have 14 players?”

Sadness, faith, but also anger… With these emotions, Dimitris Itoudis welcomed the unexpected with Dino Mitoglou in the National team shortly before its premiere in the World Cup. The federal coach emphasized that the blue and white can cover the void of the 27-year-old forwardwhile he expressed his… question about the fact that he cannot replace his name in the list declared.

What he said in detail

“After the hit, Dinos finished training and trained yesterday as well. Clinically she continues to be pain free. Athletes here represent themselves and some teams and we totally respect that. We don’t want them to have any injuries. Unfortunately, I’m coming back to the topic I opened last year. Is there any reason why teams shouldn’t have 14 players in these competitions? There is still the pandemic, there are injuries… Yesterday during the afternoon training, the 12 players were declared to FIBA. But our battle is not in the past tense. We have 11 players who have high stamina and will try to make up for the absence of the leading scorer, rebounder and minutes played in friendlies compared to what Dinos offered in the pre-season“, said initially experienced coach.

“Tonight I might pray that Moraitis grows a little taller to be four. Obviously some players will move up. In the last training session, where you want to lose tactics, we unfortunately had this unpleasant news. We will try to fill the gap with internal moves that we did in the friendlies as well. But it still means that our first scorer, our first rebounder and a point of reference will be absent. I was telling my colleagues that he didn’t want us to be the reason for the available players to become 14 and several federations embraced it. Obviously there are obstacles, costs, bureaucracy, but it would be good to have the possibility to change.

We can make five with Papanikolaou, Papapetrou, Thanasis, whoever is needed… We can only play with Papagiannis and Hatzidakis in the ‘5’. We may not need to play with such a format. We will see in practice. I’ll have to see it too. It’s sudden what happened, we didn’t expect it, but that doesn’t mean we can’t cover it“, added Dimitris Itoudis.

“Nothing is over for us. Tomorrow is the jamball and we are feeling excited. The president said something that touched me, I believe the children too. We are defending Greece in a World Championship. Everyone now has to go the extra mile. We have not lost anything, we have not yet claimed anything. We are here to compete. Obviously the difficulty is greater, but we will try. In sports, unfortunately, there are also injuries. We wish we could have dealt with it differently. Dinos would like to be with us, but he can’t. We’ll try to fill the gap, we needed extra heroics anyway. Loss saddens us but does not end us. I think we have the quality to fill the gap“, emphasized the 52-year-old coach.