Beware Of Greeks Bearing Pipe-Bombs And Wooden Clubs

Greek professional football has been suspended indefinitely after referee Christoforos Zografos was hospitalised after being beaten by two men armed with wooden clubs in the western Kolonos area of Athens.
Zografos is the assistant director of Central Referee Committee (CRC), which appoints match officials.

Rumours of high level matchfixing and biases in the appointment of officials have been rife in recent years, so much so that a decision was made pre-season to bring in a non-Greek to head the CRC.
Unfortunately, the selection was Hugh Dallas who has done more than any other match official in Britain to bring the game into disrepute.

Meanwhile, the situation is even worse in Cyprus where the offices of the Cyprus referees' association were targeted in a pipe-bomb attack after a fire bomb had previously been thrown at the home of an assistant referee in Limassol. Earlier in the year, bombs damaged the car of a prominent referee and the head of the refereeing association.

Cypriot football  has issues with integrity due to the amount of dirty Russian money sloshing around the island.
UEFA are aware of this and yet allowed Cypriot teams to be drawn against Russian ones in the Qualifying Phases of both the Champions League (AEL v Zenit) and the Europa League this season (Apollon v Lokomotiv Moscow and Omonia Nicosia v Dinamo Moscow).
The first leg of AEL v Zenit was a highly suspicious matchfixing event while Omonia had also met Budocnost Podgorica and Metalurg Skopje in previous rounds (teams from Montenegro and FYR Macedonia frequently surface in the underground Russian betting markets).

The statistical likelihood of so many Russian/Cypriot events randomly being drawn are truly astronomical.
So why?

When one governing body ignores dubious structures and energises corruption while another appoints a tainted official to oversee affairs, stuff will eventually happen that will further destroy the integrity of the game.