Sheran Yeini was disappointed after last night's loss to Bnei Sakhnin, but he's already looking ahead: "We want to win the title as quickly as possible"
Dawn has just broken on Maccabi Tel Aviv's defeat last night at the hands of Bnei Sakhnin, but preparations are already underway for the team's derby against Hapoel Tel Aviv in just four days' time. In his post-match comments head coach Paulo Sousa had a word to say about the team's disappointing performance but first took time out to congratulate his opponents: "They showed the hunger and desire, for that they deserve the credit and they deserve the win because they were the team that created more chances on goal against us." Asked for his reaction to the fact that Maccabi didn't quite seem the same team on the pitch, he responded: "I think that things like this can happen during the season. Hopefully it won't happen that often. It happened now with what I hope is a comfortable gap between us and our direct opponent in second place. Hopefully we can be ourselves already in the next game because that's the way to build a football philosophy like we want – dominant in every sense, on and off the ball, with a winning mentality. To get this culture in the club, fighting for each game and fighting each season to win the league, you need to be consistent and you need to be consistent in every case, with or without wind, different pitches, with aggressive players, with everything. And you need to be focused because you need to have the right intensity and the right approach in every game to win games".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9lf8nnKssQ
Sousa also talked about the influence on the players of the close proximity of the championship match: "If there will be such an effect, we need to be worried about that because when I talk about consistency, I'm not talking about one game. I'm talking about every day we perform and train, with joy and the right intensity, to transfer that into the game to get the right performance to have the possibility of getting the right result, or the result we're looking for. Today it didn't happen and we need to make sure the next games will be very close to what we can do, both individually and collectively, to collect points".
The Maccabi head coach also addressed the issue of the players missing last night due to injury: "We had whom we had, everyone we had we tried to put into play to get the result we were looking for. We don't know yet whether (midfielder) Eran (Zahavi) will be ready for the (Tel Aviv) derby. He's making good progress but as always the culture of this team and this club is above any individual player. He's an important player but just like all the other players".
Team captain Sheran Yeini was brief in his reaction to the game: "This just wasn't our game, we weren't ourselves, we weren't committed enough, the passing was ragged, and then came their goal and that put them in the match. Not a good performance from us, they were more threatening and they deserved to win and they deserve credit for that. Our preparations weren't any different than for any other match, it just didn't work. Like all of our fans, we want to win the title as quickly as possible".
And now just four days ahead of Saturday night's derby against Hapoel Tel Aviv, Yeini believes we'll see a very different performance: "After playing like we did tonight we'll turn up next time with more fight in our game, more focused, that's for certain. I'm sure Hapoel will turn up more focused because the last thing they want is to do us any favours. It'll be quite a contest, count on that".
