AZ Alkmaar star Vangelis Pavlidis has turned to Giorgios Giakoumakis in a bid to get the inside track to dump Dundee United.
The big striker will lead the line as the Dutch side look to keep their Europa Conference League dream alive in their AFAS Stadium. Pavlidis is a Greek cap and turned to his international teammate and the Celtic star in a bid to get the edge to overturn last week’s 1-0 defeat at Tannadice.
Pavlidis said: “I don’t have good results against Scottish teams but we need to change that! I asked Giorgos Giakoumakis about Dundee United because I wanted to prepare myself for the game. I spoke to him before the first leg but now we have played them so we know more and are focused. He explained a few things to us, which was good.”
The former Willem II frontman knows his side need to play a lot better than they did in Scotland and will have to do a lot more in the final third. Pavlidis claimed: “I didn’t enjoy the physical aspect as much because we lost!
“But we have shown before that we can change these scores around and it wasn’t surprising how Dundee United played, we knew it would be difficult. I think it was a difficult game in Scotland, they had good supporters who had waited a long time for this game.
“Their crowd gave them energy but we are at home in front of our fans now. We played better last season at home compared to away, so our fans will help us. “We didn’t play well last week, it was tough for us and we need to change a lot of things. But we know what we have to do and believe we will turn this around.”
AZ are used to making an impact in European competition and Pavlidis is confident they won’t fall at the first hurdle this time “Tomorrow will be a big difference compared to last week,” the Greek star insisted.
“There’s no extra pressure on us, we have good enough players to score goals. We know we can score a goal and that’s what we want to do tomorrow.
“Of course we haven’t thought about going out, we are only thinking about winning - we are a big club who has to play in Europe. Our status is to be there, we don’t want to be outside of it so we have to give everything.”
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