Marked for Anastasios Vrousai
From our football correspondent
Uneasy
Squad31 May 2038
A fracture rules Fotios Siovas out for 14 days
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Asteras will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
Squad31 May 2038
Christos Papadopoulos was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
Squad31 May 2038
Julián Chicco falls out with a teammate over standards
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
Squad31 May 2038
“I never wanted to be anywhere else. There is unfinished business here.” Anastasios Vrousai commits to Asteras for another 3 years.
Market31 May 2038
The name of Julián Chicco keeps appearing in other people's back pages. Asteras say nothing, which says plenty.
Market31 May 2038
“There is a gap, and pretending there is not helps nobody.” Neither side has moved, and the calendar is working for exactly one of them.
Back issues
From our football correspondent
Steady
Squad16 Feb 2037
Some afternoons a goalkeeper is the team. 14 saves, several of them the sort nobody expects to see stopped, and a scoreline that flatters everybody in front of him.
Squad16 Feb 2037
A knee injury of the worst kind for Panagiotis Pelkas
71 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Asteras lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Player ratings16 Feb 2037
Camil Mmaee, 33, rolls back the years — 8.62
There is an age at which every good afternoon gets described as a throwback, which is unfair and also accurate. 8.62 at 33, and nobody on the pitch was better.
Squad16 Feb 2037
Owen Wijndal in a row with a teammate
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Asteras this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad16 Feb 2037
Words at Asteras training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Dimitris Emmanouilidis is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
Match14 Feb 2037
It finished 2‑1, and it was Camil Mmaee’s afternoon: on the scoresheet when it mattered, and the reason the points belong to Asteras.
Player ratings16 Feb 2037
There is a version of this player everybody suspected was in there, and on this evidence it is. 8.28, and no argument anywhere in the ground.
Player ratings16 Feb 2037
Successful dribbles: 8. There is a particular sort of despair on a full-back's face by the seventieth minute, and it was on display.
Boardroom16 Feb 2037
The Asteras production line keeps running
101 graduates out of an academy now rated 9 out of 20. Clubs this size survive on exactly that, and the town knows every name.