1. It was a crazy sporting summer, which started with a great Euro and Italy the continental champion, continued with Leo Messi leaving Barcelona, and ended with a strange and crowded Olympics, which brought Israel great medals in unexpected industries.
Getting back to routine soon, with the Premier League in football, the bread and butter of our sport.
Although it is a battered industry, which receives endless criticism for its unprofessionalism and chronic difficulty in closing gaps compared to the world - most of the interest and exposure is still concentrated in it.
Betar Jerusalem will open the season in nine days with a renewed home game between Teddy and Hapoel Beer Sheva, and the big question is how we got to the point where on the eve of the start of the season, every result in this game - except for Beer Sheva - will be considered a big surprise. A difficult and challenging season, and I choose gentle words to prepare Betar fans for the difficult days ahead.
The team, which was once a regular member of the Big Four club of Israeli football, has not been there for a long time.
In the coming season, it may even lose the complete hegemony it had in its own city, because after two decades of absence, Hapoel Jerusalem returns to the Premier League.
The meeting between them, two weeks ago in the Toto Cup, ended in a red victory, which indicates the tectonic shifts in the city, no less.
Hapoel Jerusalem does not have a large budget from Betar. On the contrary. But I am willing to take a gamble here and write that Hapoel will end the upcoming season in a higher place in the table, because its decision-makers know what they want, and especially understand the boundaries of the sector.
The red CEO, Uri Sheretzky, is a mirror image of his opponent on the other side of the street, Moshe Celebrates. "R.
Faresat Hemed bin Khalifa, the man who was supposed to be a co-owner of Betar but failed to meet the basic requirements of the Football Association to prove managerial ability, revealed the superficiality and lack of seriousness of celebrating.
At a press conference at the end of last season he lamented his failures, and in a moment of genuine openness he said "he was captivated by the magic of the dribble", so he acquired a huge fortune of seemingly attractive players in terms of style of play. .
The current season will already be marked by the closing of taps and public distrust.
Eli Ohana was promoted to the position of professional manager and brought the Dutchman Erwin Koeman to the coaching position, with whom he played more than 30 years ago at the Belgian Mechelen.
Erwin is the brother of the current Barcelona coach, Ronald, and has a poorer resume, but that is definitely enough for Israeli football.
The point is that if Israeli coaches drowned in the Jerusalem mud, then Koman - who is completely foreign to the rough Jerusalem reality even on lighter days - has been given a club in a difficult situation.
It's totally like putting an obstacle in front of a blind person.
2. This week, Gerd Miller, one of Bayern Munich's all-time leading scorers and one of the greatest pioneers on the continent in the 1970s, passed away.
Miller scored almost every goal for the German national team (62 goals in 68 appearances) and was the top scorer of the World Cup (14 goals) until Miroslav Klose and Cristiano Ronaldo passed him.
On the morning of his death, Miller's wife revealed that her husband had gone through six long years of suffering from Alzheimer's disease, lay idle in his bed, and had difficulty eating and drinking.
His sad death, at the age of 75, reveals a difficult phenomenon of past footballers in the world, who despite their huge fame, have had a hard time dealing with the fact that one day everything is over and the media is no longer ringing to look for them.
Eyal Berkowitz admitted after retiring from the game that he does not believe he will ever experience the thrills he experienced as a football player.
Miller was a big star who made quite a bit of money, but since he played 50 years or more ago, the money of that time is not similar in scope to the amounts that players of his size earn today.
The addiction to the bitter drop caused him to collapse financially, and his friends from Bayern, perhaps Hans and Carl Heinz Rummenigge, provided him with a living as a coach in Bayern's subsidiary.
"Miller was a giant, a machine of exiles," Shmulik Rosenthal, who played in the 1972/3 season for the best team in Germany, Borussia Mönchengladbach, told me this week and was the first Israeli to win a contract in Europe. "He was short, but with a phenomenal ability to turn quickly and kick while kneeling. He did not turn too much and did not run too much, but simply ambushed the ball, and once he reached it - it was too late for the opponent. If you want to compare him to an Israeli striker "He played in his style was Shia Glazer, who was an excellent wide striker with high speed. The difference is that Shia was a big and funny clown, and Miller was not."
Rosenthal came to Mönchengladbach through a connection between the then coach of the Israeli national team, Emanuel Sheffer, and the coach of the German team, Hans Weissweiler, the teacher and rabbi of Sheffer from the Coaching School in Cologne.
"Because his team, Hapoel Petah Tikva, refused to release him to Germany, Rosenthal went into a one - year quarantine and then joined that memorable season." Who were on the field, even for his friend, maybe the miracle was very difficult for me to keep. "
Earlier, in the early 1970s, Mönchengladbach arrived for the first visit of a German football team to Israel, crushing the team 0-6.
"The defeat was a red light before we went to the World Cup in Mexico a few months later," Rosenthal says, "and it could have saved us in the end."
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