“I’ve gotten the hang of it,” said José Luis Mendilibar, the miracle coach of European football, after Olympiacos qualified for the final of the Conference League after eliminating Aston Villa led by Unai Emery. The Greek team will play the first European final in its history after defeating the English team, fourth in the Premier, 2-0, with goals from its striker El Kaabi (10 goals in the Conference). In England, Olympiacos had already won 2-4 (6-2 overall). They will face Fiorentina, in Athens, their city, on May 29. Only one Greek team, Panathinaikos, had managed to play in a European final. They lost the European Cup to Johan Cruyff’s Ajax (2-0) in 1971.
Mendilibar has made history in Greek football at 63 years old and with 30 years of experience on the bench. At the same time, Mendi has achieved his second pass to a European final in less than a year. He did it last year with Sevilla and ended up winning the title against Roma in the Europa League. He has now played with Olympiacos and against this Aston Villa of Emery and, also, of Monchi, who hired him for Sevilla last year.
Mendilibar signed for Olympiacos last February, replacing Carlos Carvahal. The Hellenes already wanted to hire him last autumn, when he left Sevilla, but the Basque resisted. It is his first experience outside of Spain.
The coach, from the beginning, fit like a glove in an entity as special as the Greek one, with an enthusiastic fan base and property of Evangelos Marinakis, a shipping magnate. “Since I arrived I had the same feelings as when I faced Sevilla in the Europa League. Everything is quite similar,” the coach admitted to his trusted group after eliminating Maccabi Tel Aviv in a very close tie in the round of 16 (they came back from a 1-4 home defeat with a 1-6 scoreline). . Already in the final, there are seven European qualifiers that mendi has surpassed consecutively.
For Mendilibar, eliminating Monchi’s Aston Villa has been a personal challenge. The reason is obvious. Monchi signed him for Sevilla with the aim of saving the team. I did not count on him for the next project in the Andalusian club due to his lack of knowledge of tools such as the famous Big Data. The one who ended up leaving, finally, was Monchi, and Mendilibar stayed at Sevilla, where he was dismissed on the seventh day. “I am grateful to Sevilla for saying goodbye to me because that is how I have been able to get here,” said the player himself. mendi in the preview of the match against Aston Villa. Now, his close friends know how good it felt for him to leave Monchi’s team in the gutter.
“Mendi is a simple guy, a normal guy. He is direct and plain. His ideas permeate the player,” says Vicente Iborra, former Sevilla player among other teams and Olympiacos player. A peculiar technician, who flees from technology and who finds it difficult to express himself in English even though his wife is a language teacher. In Greece he always goes with a translator and on the fabulous trip he is undertaking, some anecdotes about his behavior draw attention. For example, in the quarter-final penalty shootout against Fenerbahçe, Mendilibar had his back turned during all the shots.
The coach is doing so well in Greece that he has broken one of his basic premises. He has accepted the renewal with Olympiacos even though he has always renewed in his teams year after year and in the month of June. Idolized by the fans and loved by the club’s leaders and players, Mendilibar will barely have time to celebrate this passage to the final. This Sunday he plays against PAOK in a vital match in the outcome of the Greek League. His life in Athens has developed between his rental apartment and the Olympiacos sports city. If he wins the Conference, he will not be able to walk the streets of the ancient Greek capital.
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