Maccabi Tel Aviv held their first friendly of the season at their Poland Training Camp as the Yellow & Blue faced Arka Gdynia of Poland’s First Division in a contest that ended in a 1:1 draw. Eliran Atar’s second half goal cancelled out Arka’s first half free kick strike. Following the match, the Head Coach Vladan Ivic summed up his players performance:

“For the first time I was able to see all of the players for 45 minutes. Our target for the start of preseason is to be ready for the first official game on July 12th. We are going step by step and working hard as there are a lot of things that we need to improve and we will see that in the upcoming friendly games.”

The Coach continued: “I expect that the players will fix the things that we want them to fix. We have a lot of time, but we know what we want from ourselves and if we go step by step we will improve the things we need to improve in order to be ready for the first game against Ferencváros.”

More about the match: “We played one level up in the second half, but there were some good things and things we needed to improve on in the first half as well. We will have to analyze what needs to be improved.”

Eitan Tibi also spoke about the match from his perspective: “We are still in training camp mode with very tough sessions and we are learning what the coach is expecting of us. I’m certain as time goes by, we will look even better.”

About being a veteran player at Maccabi: “I’m one of the veterans and this is my seventh training camp with Maccabi. I’m very happy that I have the privilege to be with the Club for so many years and I hope that it will continue for many more.”

Goals of the training camp: “We have to get into good shape, learn the system that we will be playing this season and also get to know the coach better while he has to get to know us. We need to jell as a unit and those are the goals of the training camp.”