The Under-19 team will fly to Porto on Sunday for their Champions League Youth League match as they will face FC Porto on Machday Three. Just before the club heads off to Europe, Ziv Arie spoke about his club’s 1:0 win over Nes Tziona, the Champions League game and the busy week ahead for Maccabi “Shachar”:
“We’re preparing for the match within a number of parameters. In the match against Nes Tziona we wanted to make sure our opponent wouldn’t have any dangerous chances on our goal. Over the years with a strong offensive side or one that’s no so 
strong, any time we don’t give up a foolish goal we end up winning the game. On Saturday we did a good job with that. Not only did we control the game we had a bunch of chances. We should’ve had 6-7 goals in our favor.”
On the offensive side that couldn’t succeed in scoring more goal:
“I told the players that we have a young and inexperienced offense, one that’s pretty new so it will take some time to adjust. Until we can get better in this aspect of the game we will have to keep taking points as best as we can and we’ve been able to do that in all of the matches except for one.”
There’s many matches coming up for the young Yellow-and-Blue:
“I’m not going to lie, we are thinking about all of the games that we have. We’re flying on Sunday and the Champions League is an incredible experience. Porto is an excellent team that came back from being 3 goals down in one of the games. Like all 
of the other Champions League matches we have, we’ll come to play football, play better defense and get a good result. When we get back to Israel we will have to prepare for Maccabi Haifa, a match that we always like to play in.”
The feeling amongst the players:
“The players understand that this is a dream and we spoke about this just last night. They’re playing in the Champions League and some may even play with the first team in the Toto Cup. We told them that with hard work anything is possible.”
