Let's start from the end, it's always fun to beat Beitar, in the league, in the Toto Cup, or even in the senior bowling championship. Those butterflies in the stomach, the excitement, even if both teams are on the boards and at the bottom of the league - the game is always full of color and a crazy atmosphere in the stands.
But last night they decided not to.
Again a game without an audience.
Sometimes I think that the ridiculous punishment that hurts Israeli football, is just waiting for games like this.
I suddenly realized that every week I complain about something else, but I'm not sure that the problem lies in me.
Sometimes it's police violence, sometimes collective punishment unrelated to reality, illogical hours and days of games or ridiculous prices for a game in Kiryat Shmona, to the point where you start to wonder if you didn't buy a ticket for the Champions League final.
Bloomfield is empty again, photo: Alan Shiver
It was shocking to see the teams take the field, when instead of the madness, the decorations and the color in the stands, there is silence.
Such a quiet kind that just takes out all the emotion that is still left in a game like this.
Instead of an atmosphere of a game between two huge rivals, full of history and stories that I grew up with as a football fan, I got an atmosphere of a game between Hapoel Hadera and Nes Ziona.
In the Toto Cup.
The kind of silence that, in my eyes, has no place in Israeli football.
Football is played for the audience, but with us it always feels like the decision makers here have long since forgotten that.
Among all the silence and frustration (and the atmosphere of a training camp in Poland), there was also football.
I really don't remember a game with so many exes between the teams as if it were the marital history of a Bozaglo fan.
It was strange to see David Keltins wearing red when in front of him was Shay Eisen with the lamp on his chest, but I got over it with the own goal in the final minutes.
Hapoel started well, tried to press and even scored first, and it seems that Alan Ozbolt, who was fought for so much in the summer, is starting to provide numbers.
Immediately after the goal Hapoel simply stopped playing.
Every deep ball simply cut through our entire defense, but Beitar insisted on missing, luckily for us. I sometimes tend to exaggerate, but I really think that the mere fact that we were tied at halftime is a miracle on the scale of tearing the Red Sea.
Drapitch, photo: Alan Shiver
I have to admit that I can't understand Drapich, neither the rotation, nor the lineup, nor the substitutions.
He burned El Yam as if he had leavened at Passover, Gonzalez jumps from the lineup to the bench to the stands as if he is in a sea-land game and mostly feels that there is no method or game pattern.
On the other hand, Drapić really manages to collect points without actually playing football.
Somehow with a bit of their foreign dialect and a lot of Shi Eisen working somehow steals a winning goal and even the disproportionate shouts that tried to simulate the volcano that was supposed to explode in the goal at that moment could not hide the shame of the empty Bloomfield at that moment.
Hapoel fans outside gate 5,
Four wins in six games, it's amazing compared to the ability of Hapoel Mirror on the field, and I might even start to believe that playing without an audience does these players only good.
From here we are facing Sunday, and it is clear that in Sami Ofer against Maccabi Haifa only Drapich's luck will not be enough.
We have to see something else.
By the way, I imagine that there is a lot to explain to the potential buyers who were sitting on the heights of the podium and drinking beer to their pleasure.
For example, the Israel Police sometimes conducts owl checks at the entrance to the stands, so be careful in the future.
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