On Wednesday July 31st our team took on Istanbul Basaksehir in a high quality friendly in OAKA just 8 days time before our European qualifier.

George Angelidis for AEK LIVE

The atmosphere for a game in late July was quite the good one, with about 10 to 12 thousand gathering to see the team. We came up against some real quality really for the first time in our preseason. Like likes of Robinho, Arda Turan, Edin Visca, and Demba Ba who didn’t feature, are names in this high caliber roster that Basa is copped with.

Moving forward to what I saw during the match. The first half was by far better than the second with many more chances being created by both sides. Both sides could have scored if it wasn’t for some very fine saves by Vassilis Barakas and Mert Gunok. Barkas in particular made a couple of top class saves denying Robinho from close range and the Bosnian International, Visca’s shot in the 17th minute. Victor Klonaridis also had a couple of chances to get his name on the score sheet.

There were not real big talking points in the second half as understandably the rhythm of the game slowed down after many substitutions. The match would end 0-0. What we did see is however was the debut of Nelson Oliveira. He played alongside Livaja who also came on in the 60th minute as well. There was a lot of interchange between Livaja who technically started on the left of midfield with Geraldes playing the number 10 role that we have been seeing a lot of lately. The tactical play from the coach is evident that the 3 attacking midfielders behind the number 9 are very fluid and interchange positions a lot. This however need a lot of time, patience and work on the training pitch to get it as sharp as possible.

Once again we saw Simoes drop between the center backs to pick up the ball and start the attack. Being that Basa is surely at a higher level than the rest of our preseason opponents I wanted to see how well we could handle playing out of the back almost at times in a stubborn fashion. Of course this is something that comes from the coach and is something that we are going to see a lot of this year.

We will know who our opponent is later today as the second leg of the Craiova, Budapest Honvend matchup takes place in Romania. Nonetheless, from what I saw from the team so far I believe that we are in a good road but we still need a lot of work. Hopefully we are strong enough to get past the winner of tonight’s game and continue the work on the training pitch to get better and batter as the days go by. Not bad, but we can see much, much more I believe.