Jordi Cruyff, the Yellow & Blue boss spoke at the post match press conference about his squad’s 4:0 defeat at the hands of Astana in Kazakhstan on Matchday 3 of the Europa League:
“I want to congratulate Astana. I think that up until the penalty there was not much going on in the match and I believe that the goal gave them good momentum and we made mistakes that led to the 2nd and 3rd goals. When it’s minute 60 all I can think about is stopping the game. I think that this was our worst performance in the last 5-6 years. This is not the Maccabi that we know we can show and we can’t wait until the next match in Israel to show who we are.”
Moves made to open the second half:
“We made changes that would give us a chance to play more offensively. But after 5 minutes we were already down 4:0 so we knew the game was finished and we just tried to just finish this bad game and just focus and learn from it. We have an important match on Monday and we are beginning to prepare for that already. We will meet Astana in two weeks and I hope that we will show in our home that we can play there and win.”
More on Astana’s performance:
“It was clear that the two strikers were important to them and they controlled the game.”
The next match in Israel:
“Naturally we believe that in Israel we will play better. It’s difficult to say that after this game. But at home we are a different team and we hope that we will win.”
Final thoughts:
“Up until the penalty things were fairly calm. The second and third goals were due to our mistakes. On an individual level we made a number of errors and we were punished. I want to repeat that everything went wrong for us today. This was a bad result and we have to learn from our mistakes in this game.”
