RRI Sports Club – A great coach – Razvan Lucescu
Razvan Lucescu won the championship in Greece
Florin Orban, 24.04.2019, 13:06
The Greek
football club PAOK Thessaloniki, currently coached by Razvan Lucescu, has won
the Greek championship. In the last but one round, Lucescu’s trainees trounced
Levadiakos 5-nil on home turf. Following this result, PAOK reached 77 points in
the tables, five more than the runner-up Olympiakos Piraeus and mathematically
secured the title.
PAOK has
previously won the championship twice, in 1976 and 1985. The team missed the chance
to win the title last season due to the fan-provoked incidents in the matches
played against Olympiakos and AEK Athens.
Football pundits
claim PAOK’s triumph this season is mainly owed to the team’s head coach,
Razvan Lucescu. Lucescu took over PAOK in 2017 and has already won the Greek
Cup. If the team wins the Super League at the end of May and secures the
treble, Lucescu may become the most important coach in the club’s history. The
only other coach who obtained similar results was Les Shannon, who in the 1970s
won the two Greek Cups and the Greater Greece Cup, a trophy pitting the winners
of the Greek Cup and the Cypriot Cup as challengers on Easter day. Shannon
however never won the Greek domestic championship with PAOK.
Razvan Lucescu
is the son of the former football legend and coach Mircea Lucescu. He was born
on February 17, 1969 in Bucharest. As a player he played as goalkeeper for
several teams in Romania, including Sportul Studentesc, FC National, FC Brasov
and Rapid Bucharest. His spell at Rapid brought Razvan his most notable
results, also as a coach. He won two Romanian Cups, while in 2006 he got the
team through to the UEFA Cup quarterfinals, after knocking out teams such as
Feynoord Rotterdam, Shakhtar Donetsk, Hertha Berlin and SV Hamburg. Rapid at
the time lost the quarterfinals to Steaua Bucharest. In 2009 and 2011 Lucescu
also trained Romania’s national team. He started coaching in Greece in 2014,
when he took over the club Skoda Xanthi.
