Ten-man Pafos produced a disciplined display to claim a hard-fought draw on their Champions League debut at Olympiacos.<\/p>\n
The Cypriot champions were good value for their point against their Greek counterparts, with their ambitions to win the contest severely hampered by right-back Bruno Felipe’s 26th-minute dismissal for collecting two yellow cards.<\/p>\n
The withdrawal of former Chelsea defender David Luiz forced another reshuffle at the back as the visitors’ problems appeared to be mounting. <\/p>\n
However, Juan Carlos Carcedo’s side held firm despite the hosts ramping up the pressure during the second half.<\/p>\n
While Olympiacos monopolised possession and territory, that did not translate into a glut of clear-cut opportunities to score.<\/p>\n
Having already defeated established names like Maccabi Tel-Aviv, Dynamo Kyiv and Red Star Belgrade to reach this stage, Pafos delivered a fine rearguard action.<\/p>\n
It took a stinging long-range effort from captain Panagiotis Retsos, palmed to safety by visiting goalkeeper Neofytos Michael, for the home side to register a shot on target after 68 minutes.<\/p>\n
Michael was also called into action to deny Retsos from the resulting corner. <\/p>\n
Olympiacos’ Mehdi Taremi came close to levelling the playing field when he was initially shown a straight red card for a tackle on Jaja during a Pafos counter-attack, but a VAR review downgraded it to a yellow.<\/p>\n
And it was only during the final 10 minutes that the visitors’ eight-match unbeaten run away from home looked in danger, with the Iran forward having one effort blocked and miscuing another wide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ten-man Pafos produced a disciplined display to claim a hard-fought draw on their Champions League debut at Olympiacos.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":150733,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-150732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150732\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}