Players on the Maccabi Tel Aviv squad began their morning training immediately following warning sirens that were heard throughout the Tel Aviv metropolitan area. Midfielder Gal Alberman after last night's match: "The best cure for this is to win"
Last night Maccabi Tel Aviv finished their tenth round match against Bnei Yehuda with a 0-1 loss, their second in succession without finding the net. A 13th minute goal by Bnei Yehuda's Serbian striker Nenad Marinković gave the guests an early lead and continued pressure by the hosts during the rest of the match did nothing to alter the final outcome. This morning the team returned to training but they were greeted at the Kiryat Shalom training grounds by the sound of a warning siren heralding the imminent arrival of a missile attack somewhere in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area. As soon as the danger had passed the players returned to the training pitch, those who played the full 90 minutes last night for a post-match session and those who did not for a full practice. Due to the constant threat of missile attacks the club have decided to hold further practices at the new training grounds at Netanya Stadium or at Shfayim, north of Tel Aviv.
Last night's match against Bnei Yehuda was also played under the shadow of warning sirens that were heard less than an hour before kickoff, but despite the security situation just under 7,000 supporters came to Bloomfield Stadium to watch the match. After the match, midfielder Gal Alberman, sports director Jordi Cruyff and head coach Oscar Garcia talked about what happened both on and off the pitch.
Alberman talked about his feelings regarding the security situation and the fact that the match took place: "I'm not going to express an opinion here, it wasn't easy to concentrate but a decision was taken and we had to live with it. I only hope we can get in all our trainings this week and play our match next week against Hapoel Ramat Hasharon as scheduled. Above all we all hope to get back to some kind of normalcy in our daily lives, we and everyone else in the country".
Returning to football, Alberman tried to give some kind of explanation for last night's loss and looked ahead to the next match on Saturday against Hapoel Ramat Gan: "It's hard for me to analyse a match because I'm in the middle of it, but if we lost we must have done something wrong. The best cure for a run of losses is to win and that's what we'll be trying to do next week".
Maccabi Tel Aviv sports director Jordi Cruyff also tried to remain optimistic despite the loss: "The match didn't go our way, they scored and we didn't, it's our second straight loss and we have to make sure we get out of this situation. For me football is a 10,000 metre race, you can't win it after a thousand metres but you most certainly can lose it. The most important thing in football is to know how to pick yourself up after you fall and we have to make sure we do that fast with the confidence and ability that we've shown in most of the matches we've played this season".
The post-match statistics indicated Maccabi Tel Aviv had 31 goal attempts, ten of them on target. After the match, head coach Oscar Garcia stressed his side's wastefulness in front of goal: "The most important thing in football is to score, they did it and we didn't. They had two chances, we had ten, maybe fifteen, and wasted all of them and gave away possession far too easily".
