The Under-19 youth side came up short today against Porto 2:0. Maccabi “Shachar” competed valiantly with the Portuguese side at the hosts beautiful training ground just outside of the city. Head Coach Ziv Arie spoke about the match, what made the difference and looked ahead to the upcoming games.
“We’re never happy when we lose. Jordi Cruyff spoke to us and said he was happy as to how the club looked and how we played football. But we’re disappointed and rightfully so. We played against a team at a very high level with excellent players. The first half was better than the second and we controlled the ball and looked more like a team. We weren’t as good in the second half and that was the result of a poor day by some of our midfielders. We will continue on and we showed that we could stand up to this level of competition and it will be much harder for them in Israel.
On giving up an early goal:
We continued to play the same way and had two midfielders playing more defensively to close Porto up. At halftime we said that we could win the game but we didn’t want to go crazy and take a risk because they could punish us if we did. We had some chances but the match ended the way it ended.”
What Arie took from the match:
“I told the players that after December 8th when the Champions League will end we will be a much better and stronger team. After six Champions League matches we will be even more of a team. We will do a rotation with the players going forward and we are looking at the upcoming Haifa match.”
Club captain Dan Glazer spoke about how he saw the match from his point of view:
“This was a match that we played well and one that we could have drawn. At these levels it’s the small things that make the difference. We had a few chances where we could have done a bit better, but we’ll learn from this and continue on.”
How the match began:
“Every match has its differences. The training staff prepared us very well with detailed reports on the players and the team and you could see that we came into the match ready to go. Maybe because of the result they had against Chelsea we weren’t focused at the start but we snapped out of that very quickly by controlling the tempo and we had a number of quality chances. Around the box we weren’t able to get as many good chances as we would have liked.”
On the difference between the Champions League and the Domestic competition:
“In this tournament we are playing against top level central defenders that are out of our league. They are big, fast and physical. Our offensive players are very young and we had a few chances. Against Nes Tziona we had ten opportunities on their goal and we didn’t take advantage of them.”
What came out of the match:
“We will take the actual game play but not the result, we’l take what we learned and use it to take advantage of our opportunities in the next match”
