AEL took all three points against Anorthosis in the opening round of the First Division, winning 2:0 on Saturday. The result puts the hosts fourteenth in the table with a perfect record from one match, while the visitors drop to twelfth after their sole defeat.
It was not a clean sheet from the start — A. Chrysostomou picked up a yellow card in the thirty-third minute — but the home side took the lead when H. Catakovic found the net in the forty-second. The striker was then substituted for A. Karo at half-time, a switch that did little to quiet the home crowd.
Y. Gomis doubled the advantage soon after the break, striking in the fiftieth minute. By then Anorthosis had already lost their captain, Y. van Nieff, to a red card in the seventy-second. Playing the second half a man down meant the visitors could only watch the game slip away, and Gomis was eventually replaced by M. Ilia in the seventy-fourth.
Both sides made heavy changes in the closing stages. Anorthosis brought on S. Thandi and C. Aboagye together in the fifty-seventh, while AEL responded with several substitutions from the seventy-eighth minute onwards — Rafa Lopes, F. R. Mughe, and G. Papageorgiou among them. Gabriel Furtado came on for Anorthosis in the eighty-fifth, and Sergio Conceicao picked up a late yellow card in stoppage time.
The statistics tell a simple story. Possession sat at fifty-fifty, but AEL registered seven shots on target compared to Anorthosis's one. The visitors earned eight corners and made twenty throw-ins, yet could not find the back of the net. Shots accuracy tells the same tale — forty-seven per cent for the hosts against seventeen for the away side.
And here's the thing — three points from a single match is not much, but it is something. AEL sit on top of their section with a three-point cushion, while Anorthosis have nothing to show for their only outing. The goal difference is +2 for the winners and -2 for the losers, and that is where the opening round leaves it.