Maccabi Tel Aviv have played all 68 seasons in the Israeli top flight but for Ness Ziona, this is only the third season with the big boys.
The two clubs met in the starting fixture of this season’s TASE Premier League and Maccabi kicked off their campaign with a comfortable 2-0 away win at the Moshava Stadium in Petah Tikva.
Maccabi Tel Aviv have never dropped a point or lost a match to Ness Ziona over the years. In the distant past, as Maccabi Ness Ziona, the top club in the town in the early days of the league, Tel Aviv won 7-1 in December 1949. Maccabi Ness Ziona folded in March 1950 and all their subsequent games were determined as 3-0 defeats, including the one against Maccabi. Football Section Ness Ziona, an amalgamation of the town’s outfits and Maccabi Ness Ziona’s successors, were formed in 1955 and are the club currently in existence.
Maccabi have also played Ness Zion in the State Cup four times and have won all four ties.
Past and present players:
Two players have turned out for both outfits, Avraham Stemberg and the legendary Shiye Glazer.
Stemberg played for Ness Ziona in the 1960s, including the famed 1966-68 double season when they were in the top flight, and he moved to Maccabi in 1969-70 where he played for six seasons and won two league championship medals.
Glazer, one of Maccabi’s all-time greats where he played between 1945-1963, moved down to the second division towards the end of his career and played for Hapoel Kfar Sava, Beitar Netanya and Beitar Jerusalem. He finally retired after playing with Ness Ziona when they were in the top flight.
Of the current crop, Dor Galili and Osher Abu, who are Ness Ziona players, grew up in Maccabi’s youth setup and each has played once for the full team in the Toto Cup.
Starting the second phase:
For the 54th time, the second phase of the league is starting with a corresponding round to the opening of the season and on the 53 previous occasions that this has happened, Maccabi have notched 27 wins and 15 draws and have suffered 11 defeats.
Maccabi have met 21 different opponents at the start of the second phase and the most common opponents have been Maccabi Petah Tikva (seven times).
The biggest wins at the start of the second phase have been 5-0 wins over Hapoel Rishon Lezion in 1978-79 and Hapoel Acre in 2013-14. Both those seasons ended with Maccabi winning the league title.
This will be the third of five planned consecutive league games at Bloomfield. The longest number of consecutive games at Bloomfield was seven, in 1972-73. Four of those were home games and three were away fixtures. They were against Tel Aviv rivals, Beitar, Shimshon and Hapoel.
