The Yellow & Blue’s Head Coach, Shota Arveladze addressed the media following his side’s Matchday Nine 0:0 draw at the Netanya Stadium. The Maccabi boss discussed the gap to the first place side, pressure, injuries and what he felt Petach Tikva did against his squad to split the points:
“The general picture against us is that the other teams park the bus as well as wasting time. But the boys will continue to fight for the team.”
Slow match:
“We have heavy legs and it was the slowest game that I’ve seen from Maccabi. We may have played bad games but this was the slowest game from the first minute and it tells me that we have the hardest schedule and we have a very short break for the players to rest. The National Team guys will go again as well. I don’t want to take anything from our opponent, they played well.”
Lots of chances:
“We had a lot of chances today and some players had two of three. We may have given some chances away but only a few. We had some injuries before the game, Oscar and Eden were both hurt but Nosa had some chances as did others. We need to find the ball. I don’t think this has anything to do with leadership.”
Injuries:
“If someone is injured we go on and we aren’t hiding anything. No one asked. Injuries are normal in football when someone is out one or two games. We want to play at a high level and we want to win.”
Pressure:
“We aren’t here to say that everything is good, but we have to look at the whole picture and not at just one bad run or a bad ten minutes. There is always pressure on every striker and when you want to be number one there is always pressure. You have to put your head down and keep on going.”
Five point gap to the top of the table:
“We try to take three points every game. Every team will lose and we can can win to get back the points. We need to concentrate and capture points.”
