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Striker Barak Itzhaki, who saw his penalty saved in dramatic fashion deep into injury time of Maccabi's Europa League tie against APOEL, is already looking ahead to the next match: "All I can do now is apologise"

Last night, Maccabi Tel Aviv made their debut in the season 2013/14 group stages of the Europa League, playing out a goalless draw at home against Cypriot champions APOEL Nicosia. Understandably, most of the post-match attention focused on striker Barak Itzhaki, who saw his penalty saved in dramatic fashion deep into injury time. Maccabi Tel Aviv head coach Paulo Sousa had this to say at the end of the match: "If you ask me what I think of the result, of course I'm disappointed. But I am very proud of how the players performed. Before the match, in fact from the first day I arrived at Maccabi, I said that our main objective this term is the league. As for the penalty, I have no preferences which player takes the kick, I believe in all my players. Barak Itzhaki is the kind of player who can deal with these kinds of situations and score. Tonight he missed, next time I feel sure he won't".

After the final whistle striker Barak Itzhaki left the pitch to face awaiting journalists and talked about the missed penalty: "I'm extremely disappointed, very unpleasant, but it seemed to me the right thing to do that as a substitute, I would be less tired than most of the players that had played the full 90 minutes so I took the ball, kicked the penalty and unfortunately I missed. All I can do now is apologise to our fans and hope I can repay them on Monday against Maccabi Haifa. We have a lot of depth in the squad at Maccabi so we knew we'd be rotated a lot. Each player has to understand that if he finds himself on the bench it's something he has to deal with as well as he can. Everywhere in the world there are great players sitting on the bench and really there's no point dwelling on the matter. Everyone who plays for us is the best and if there's rotation he has to accept that ".   

With Monday night's match against Maccabi Haifa at Kiryat Eliezer Stadium in mind, head coach Paulo Sousa said a few words about the rotation of the squad: "I have no rotation, my decisions regarding the right squad are based on the nature of the particular match we're preparing for. In all I'm quite pleased with tonight's starting 11, you could see that throughout the match APOEL showed respect for us and that's why they threw up that defensive bunker.  I'm quite happy to see that there are clubs in Europe that respect us. Tonight I'm still thinking about the APOEL match, tomorrow we start thinking about Monday's match against Maccabi Haifa".