After the return of twelve of their players from international duty, Maccabi Tel Aviv held an evening practice with a nearly complete squad ahead of their Sunday night league tie at 8.10pm against Ironi Ramat Hasharon. The practice was held at the National Stadium in Ramat Gan where the match will be held due to the winter re-seeding at Bloomfield Stadium.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kO19sEOV28
Prior to the practice the club held their weekly pre-match press conference. Maccabi head coach Paulo Sousa talked about the squad that has carried on training in the week of the World Cup qualifiers: "A lot of our players were on international duty, unfortunately (midfielder) Dor Micha and (striker) Barak Itzhaki were both injured during the week. Today was our first opportunity to train with a full squad, that makes things more difficult but we're happy to have them back". As for the injured players he said: "Today we'll get the results of Micha's test, Itzhaki has a light injury but we still don't have the full picture. Things like that happen because there are changes in the training routine, Ithaki's injury is a recurring muscle strain so it's hard to tell. What's certain is that they won't be able to play on Sunday, and that goes too for (defender) Reef Peretz who is recovering from his injury".
As for Sunday's opponent, he said: "Ramat Hasharon pose a real challenge for us. They're trying to get themselves off the bottom of the table and beat us in the process. They've had the opportunity to train with all of their players so were looking at a difficult encounter. For every match we analyse what we need to improve and you can expect us to be scoring goals in our upcoming matches".
Swedish striker Rade Prica talked about the last encounter between the two clubs last April when he scored one of the goals in the match that sealed for Maccabi the league Championship: "I have good memories in that Stadium and I'm looking forward to Sunday's match. Having so many players missing makes it difficult, but we've worked very hard all week, trained a lot and did everything we possibly could. When I go out on the pitch I'm always looking to score but football is a team effort so you can't be too dependent on any particular player but look to the team as a whole". Regarding the last league game at Ashdod he said: "It was a tough match, they're tempo was very slow and we should have scored the first goal. Unfortunately you can't win every match". He also talked about playing in Europe and in the league: "I had that when I was playing in Norway too, the European games are more difficult and if we can put on a high level display in all our competitions, that would be a very good thing because we have the players and a very strong squad".
