Slavisa Jokanovic spoke about his team’s loss to Haim Silvas’s Hapoel Raanana as Barak Itzhaki’s lone goal wasn’t enough for the Yellow-and-Blue. Jokanovic discussed the club’s shortcomings, the Israeli league and the challenges that lie ahead.

 Was this loss an aftereffect from the Chelsea match:

 “We must be competitive in the Israeli league too. We can’t just think about the Champions League as tonight we didn’t play with enough effort and power. We opened the match well and we dominated. The other team shot twice and scored two goals and it’s difficult to play when they had many players on defense.”

When Eran Zahavi has a hard game it makes everything more difficult:

“We can’t rely just on Zahavi and we were short some players who were out injured and we needed more options. We didn’t show a big difference between us and Raanana. We tried hard and our desire was there but what we did today was just not enough.”

The quality of the Israeli league may be high:

“We dominated but we didn’t do enough to stop the counterattack and we will face this type of defense many times this season so we must be prepared.”

It seems that Raanana didn’t give Maccabi any respect the way you did against Chelsea:

“Raanana worked very hard and they punished us today. We were organized at Stamford Bridge but we didn’t have the quality. We didn’t play well enough today and we didn’t deserve to win especially when we gave up the second goal.”

If you have more more matches like today you’ll have a hard time to repeat as champions:

“We will have to improve and we didn’t do enough today. It was a hard week for us and we have more matches ahead for Haifa and Kyiv. It’s not about one match a week but two.”