Peter Bosz, Maccabi Tel Aviv’s Dutch boss spoke about the upcoming game against Bnei Yehuda away, although at Bloomfield Stadium this Saturday evening at 19:30. As the regular season draws to an end next Matchday and then heads into the playoff round, the club is focusing on continuing it’s run of good form over the past few weeks and spoke about the time off given to the players:

“I didn’t give them an extra day off. I looked at my schedule and I always give them a certain amount of free time. In my structure I always give 3 days off before the next game. It has nothing to do with the season. I have a set structured schedule for 6 weeks but we don’t always know the schedule in advance. However, since we had back to back Saturday games the past week it was possible this time around.”

About  this week’s opponent:

“Bnei Yehuda is a strong team and won’t give us much room to be with the ball. It will be similar to many of the matches we have played so far.”

Catching Beer Sheva:

“The biggest problem is that we are 5 points behind Beer Sheva. We are winning, but so are they. We will see at the end of the season who is the best and we can only see that after 36 games. Both teams are strong and will fight to the end of the year, it will be exciting for the fans.”

Comparing defending and the defense:

“You defend with whole team, it’s not just the defensive players. You have to differentiate between that and you can’t blame the defense on the last goal in this past week’s game that came off of a corner kick. It was everybody’s responsibility.”

Central defender Tal Ben Haim’s status:

“He’s good enough for Maccabi otherwise he wouldn’t be here. You have to remember that he played the first 6 or 7 games when I got here and then he was injured. Last week he had one group training with the team and it wasn’t enough for me to have him play in the Hapoel Haifa game.”

Player selection for the style of play:

“I decide which players play and it depends on the opponent and how that team will play against us as well. The second part of the last match ended totally different from how we started. We changed what we were doing after 60 minutes and put more offensive players in. We had only two holding midfielders in Nosa Igiebor and Haris Medunjanin on the pitch in order for us to open up the game.”

Impact of the new players who came to the club:

“That’s the reason why the club brought in those players. It was to help out for the last 12 games. They fit into the system and that’s why Jordi brought them in to help win the title and win the cup. Haris has played in all the games and Orlando was injured after the first game but last week he was able to play off the bench.”

Injury status of Omri Ben Harush and Barak Itzhaki:

“We’re not sure if Omri can play yet and he had a knee problem so we will see. Barak will 100% not be able to play.”