Jordi Cruyff, the Yellow & Blue Head Coach spoke about his club’s 3:1 victory against Hapoel Ashkelon that moved Maccabi into first place:
“I think it’s important that we can continue our winning ways. The second half we had a bit more rhythm and looked a bit more threatening and for the third game in a row we had to get to the 2:1 thanks to Barak (Itzhaki). But again we made it difficult for ourselves by giving up a soft goal and creating a mountain to climb out of. Against teams that play close it’s difficult to find space but in the end we deserved to win and we will look forward to the next game.”
Back into first place after 48 games:
“To me personally it doesn’t mean anything and it shouldn’t mean anything to us. It’s not important where we are now but where we are at at the end of the season. It’s the least important detail of the match. The team has good momentum.”
Changes over the few last matches:
“We stepped it up and we all understand that things were going in the wrong direction. The first thing is to show character and play with a certain level of aggressiveness on the pitch. We tried to find a system that gave us defensive security, play in the box and win our battles in the midfield. More than the system, it’s been the players that have stepped it up higher and the players who were missing are now back and there is healthy competition. It’s a headache situation for a coach but I prefer this headache situation than the one we had a few months ago.”
Suffering first:
“It’s a marathon and it’s just another round to come to the end in the best possible way. I know that to win things you need to suffer first and we suffered difficulties and a lot difficult games, losing a lot of points. Now it’s time to recover what we lost and show that we are a candidate for the title.”
Transfers:
“It won’t be crazy spendings. If we see something we will see, but we have a good squad.”
Set pieces:
“We haven’t conceded a lot of goals on set pieces but we are working on them in practice but we still have yet to see improvement.”
Opening up the attack:
“We wanted to play with two strikers and Barak as the third, but we needed to create space and that were the problems we had in the first half, but we ran out of space. That’s what we worked on in the second half to play more offensive with less strikers.”
Cup match against Maccabi Haifa on Wednesday:
“Maccabi Haifa will be tough. They have an excellent squad, players, fans and stadium. We have to make sure that the beast doesn’t wake up against us. Every time we drop 1% of energy we put ourselves in trouble. We have to be focused. A Cup game is always different than a league game. When they connect they will be dangerous.”
Concerned when the match was 1:1:
“We had three subs with the idea to change something as we would use Dasa to open up and then we scored. There was still a lot of minutes to be played and we made the subs regardless.”
