Papanikolaou: “Coach Bartzokas is viral – There is respect with Slukas, what we have experienced is not erased”

For winning the medal with the National Team, whether the letter from the Panathinaikos players affected the blue and white team, his relations with his fellow traveler, Kostas Sloukas after his move to the “trefoil”, like Olympiakos, but also Giorgos Bartzokas was spoken by Kostas Papanikolaou.

In detail what he said to Cosmote TV:

On whether the letter from the Panathinaikos players created an issue in the locker room of the National team: “Not in any case. It was something that was published, it never made it into the locker room beyond some spur-of-the-moment teasing, but to all the kids’ credit, it was something that went straight through the locker room. Basically it never entered, it was never discussed in a serious tone. Generally our approach this year was that we didn’t allow things that could hurt the team to come into the locker room and affect the whole thing. I don’t know how it happened, but magically all the guys, none of the 17 that were there from the beginning let anything affect the locker room and get in».

On his relationship with Kostas Slukas after his move to Panathinaikos: “There is respect with Kostas. It is undeniable. We have grown up together. We have accomplished so much together. Not everything can be deleted like this. Obviously, and I’ve made it clear other times, but unfortunately we get pieces that are convenient for us to get a lot of times, within a race, even in a training session, how competitive you are makes the difference between making it to the top level or not. For me, this competition has brought me here and when I step on the floor with whoever I have in front of me, I don’t look, I don’t look to find friendships at that moment and I don’t look to find something different to think about. I have these boxes in my mind and I can separate them. As I can tell that when we play for the National Team we enter the field and fight for our country. We are not fighting each for himself. We are all fighting for a common cause. And this happened again this summer and we succeeded».

On the difference that Giorgos Bartzokas has on camera compared to what happens behind the cameras: “As we all are. When you enter a stadium and your pulse reaches 200 and you have to influence the game, either as a coach or as a player, there will be a moment, it’s not just coach Bartzokas, lies are bad. It’s just that coach Bartzokas has become more viral, it’s something that everyone is looking for now. So every time something happens, we take it and magnify it. But I don’t think there is a coach or a player respectively who won’t have a moment where they will have an outburst, who will have a moment of tension.

And I have said it too many times, it is too easy to judge a man by his work in the moment of great tension and otherwise to know him as a man who is outside of it. Because I think that each one of us in any job, on the day when he is very stressed and has cameras on him, 10,000 eyes looking at him and such, the pressure increases by 10 and it is more likely that you will get a reaction or something that you may at that moment consider as negligible, someone will take it, magnify it and make it hairy. It’s too easy. So I think we’re wrong to hang on so much and point it out again. It’s like we challenge and invite everyone, the whole world to do this».