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There is something to come in football: the Conference League is the appropriate punishment for Israeli teams
After years of deterioration and neglect, coming to terms with low standards and a pomp of "stars", the Israeli teams find themselves struggling in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan and dream of the oppressive regional league.
Apparently that's what they deserve, and us
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Conference League
Paz Hasdai
Saturday, August 21, 2021, 9 p.m.
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The week before the return of the Premier League is always festive.
The preparations are over.
We are in the midst of a final warm-up, tightening the shirt into our pants, stepping onto the pitch in a column.
These are the days when we feel like in the famous video from the Argentine league, when the players go up to the grass from the locker room, and at the end of the stairs the team manager waits and slaps each of them in the face to inspire and motivate.
These are days of mobilization, general reviews of the status of the teams, summer summaries and staff changes, and in principle it is always a week that includes a kind of mental calculation: a last week of pre-action talks, where we try to examine our situation and where we are headed. Inspect a home before drifting into the league routine.
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And the audience continues to get excited.
Israeli football (Photo: Maor Elkelsi)
So what are we doing? Usually the feeling is that the league opens too early, after too short a break, when it's still too hot, when the teams are still trying to rust in the Toto Cup games (which have always been a miserable and tedious enterprise, every phone call I get is perceived as an insult and failure). Background to European factory qualifiers and weak games under heavy heat; But this year, ahead of the 2021/22 season (how time ran), UEFA pampered us with another gift, which is hard to decide whether it is a small spit or a bucket of water on the face - the Conference League. And in fact, the Conference League qualifiers.
And not that the Europa League is such a big deal.
She always had the feeling of the fucking and poor sister, that the very participation in her is an embarrassment and a punishment for the big clubs.
After all, the Champions League is no longer a cherry or a whipped cream, but the Europa League was played on Thursday evenings after Tuesday and Wednesday of the Champions, it is already exhausted and seventy, and if you are a neutral football fan and your team is not in the factory, it is hard to find great interest in it.
However, there has always been a sense of a relatively respectable framework that suits Israeli standards, a proper and financially rewarding consolation for our teams, and speaking of the standard European football fan, we knew we were inside, in a round, that an ordinary fan knows the Israeli teams. Football learns throughout its life to know dozens of cities across Europe from just the scoreboards.
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This is what we cooked.
The champion in the depression league (Photo: official website, Maccabi Haifa)
But not only does the Europa League continue to be worn out, and continues to be not really exciting, but now an even more screwed-up sister has been added, the same regional league, the one that is supposed to bring together the fallout to boost the Europa League prestige, and so we find ourselves starring in that league , In the remnants of the remnants, and preparing for it with all their might, with three representatives full of ambitions in the factory: After all, isn't everyone here fighting for a ticket to Europe? And on Wednesday the teams hold press conferences, and the preparations are at their peak, and the coach is debating the lineup and the lineup, and the teams are training on the hard field, and the Israeli media reports what the local media say about the Israeli team, all for the same dubious setting. Or in the case of a really tough lottery, the Cypriot anorthosis, which unfortunately is always accompanied by the addition of "our informant".
And as he snuggles up to him on Thursday night between the canals and holes at the ends of the continent and the oppressive stadiums in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, all of a sudden it dawns on him: this is our punishment.
That's what we deserve.
After all, we did not just find ourselves in the regional league, in the Balkans of football.
This is not accidental.
This is the result after years of neglect, slow decline, acceptance of our situation.
Years of disproportion between the standards in the industry and the sums of money circulating in it, years of bad results, of deterioration in the team and a drop in the rankings, years of Luzon and Berkowitz and Tibis, this is the cake we cooked.
Struggled against a not-so-easy rival, the Cypriot Anorthosis.
Renewable Beer Sheva (Photo: Danny Maron)
And suddenly you can understand Yonatan Cohen, who prefers to play in the second league in Italy, after all, Serie B looks as pure as the summit of the Alps against the background of the synthetic pitch of Kargandy, on which Maccabi Tel Aviv has had such a hard time; And yes, Yonatan Cohen, who after the big hype around him and Amichai Spiegler's decisive announcement after the 3: 4 that he is "the next star of Israeli football", the maximum he can achieve is the Italian sub-league, and he does not hesitate. And can be understood. And what about the noble Omar, who in Spain dried up on the bench and returned home to return to being a star, and this week celebrated with his teammates a draw in Baku? That his situation is better than that of Maccabi Tel Aviv, which from the beginning went on a draw in Kazakhstan.
How dangerous this framework looks, at the end of a quality summer that began with a fine Euro and ended with a historic Olympics that made it clear that athletes in Israel can succeed, and presented its footballers in a miserable light.
Of course all the reviews and all the failures failed to change the industry and certainly never hurt the love of the audience, with only this week released figures showing that the big teams continue to sell subscriptions and arouse interest among fans.
And yet, there is poetic justice in our inclusion in this Conference League, in our struggles and difficulties to integrate into it, a kind of poetic justice and a worthy punishment for everyone, players and coaches, broadcasters and fans.
Doubt it will calm anyone down.
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