Following the 3:4 loss to Zenit St. Petersburg, the Yellow & Blue midfielder, Yossi Benayoun didn’t hide his disappointment from the match:
“This is a hard loss to digest. We played well and were leading 3:0, the points were in our hands, but that’s football, sometimes it’s in our favor and sometimes it’s against us. We played against a big team who we gave the chance to come back into the game. They had plenty of chances near the end of the contest to score.”
The club’s ability to close out the final minutes of a match:
“We felt good. Both on the offensive side of the pitch as well as the defensive. We felt positive playing against them, as we held the ball and slowed down the end of the match, maybe we should have done it more. When you make a mistake at these levels, you pay the price and let your opponent get back into the game, it becomes very difficult to stop the snowball effect.”
On Zenit’s second goal:
It came after a red card was issued and it was a shock for the team to lose both a player and for them to cut the lead to 3:2. This put us under a lot of pressure and we should have tried to stop it. But that didn’t happen today except for the fact that we were able to stand toe to toe with our opponent who on paper looked to be much better.”
Having to prepare now for the match against Raanana:
“We have to be well prepared just like any other match. We’ll already begin looking at Raanana at the training session tomorrow. Every league match is difficult but we have a big squad with a lot of good players and we have to win the game.”
