The experience of the World Cup in Qatar was powerful and unforgettable, but it was also not easy in terms of missing family and children.
As part of an initial agreement with my son before the World Cup, we decided that as compensation for my absence from his life for a month, I would take him and his older sister to see soccer matches in the best league in the world and in the second best city in the world after Tel Aviv (even though in soccer it wins by a large margin).
So after we watched Tottenham continue to disappoint against Unai Emery and Aston Villa, yesterday (Tuesday) came the main course - when Arsenal, the proud leader of the Premier League, hosted Newcastle at the Emirates Stadium, which is indeed the team with the richest owner in the world, but is at the beginning of its construction process, and despite this She is having a tremendous season above and beyond expectations.
As far as I'm concerned, the story of the two teams is the two coaches: both are young, both of them in Israeli football would have been fired a long time ago or didn't even get a chance to stand on the lines of clubs with great aspirations, a story that also illustrates many of the differences between the top of football and our little piece of God.
Mikel Arteta.
Find his way, photo: Reuters
On one side, stood Mikel Arteta, the captain of the team in the past, and the man who was Pep Guardiola's right-hand man for 3 and a half years, who received the team on December 22, 2019 and went through a very difficult first two and a half years.
At the beginning he tried to copy things he learned at City into a team that wasn't ready for it, later he tried to find his own self along with the insights he took from Pep as a coach and from himself as a player and football player, and only after two unsuccessful seasons and a lot of praiseworthy patience and faith on the part of his employers, he found the formula and by and large;
His Arsenal is a very young team (apart from Xhaka who is 30, no player in the squad has celebrated his 27th birthday), which combines a fast forward game with the ball movement patterns of Pep and City.
On the other side stood two - coach Eddie Howe and his assistant Jason Tyndall, both 45 years old. The choice of Newcastle, rich in coaches, was somewhat surprising, but the people at the club knew exactly what they were doing.
This is a great coach, a gracious tactician, who managed to build a great team without a flashy acquisition (perhaps except for Gimarish), upgrade existing players (Longstaff, Almiron), make relatively cheap acquisitions in key positions (Pope and Butman) and make Newcastle the hardest team to defeat in the league (one loss only this season and the best defense in the league).
Eddie Howe
A demonstration for his assistant, photo: Reuters
It was nice to see how Howe gives the stage to his assistant, who stands next to him in the technical area throughout the 90 minutes and looks like an equal coach among equals, which is really not trivial.
At the end of the game, I accompanied Niv Debrat to an interview with Howe, who showed a lot of class, won the game beautifully and even responded with a smile with a compliment to the confrontation between Arteta and his bench in the closing minutes following the penalty that was not whistled in favor of Arsenal.
So it's true, we flew for five and a half hours and saw a goalless game, but we enjoyed every moment.
From the rhythm of the game, from the encouragement of both audiences, from the fans who flock to the souvenir shop before and after the game and especially from the football culture in the kingdom, a culture that the British have fun with.
And it's true, sometimes there are bad games in England too.
Sometimes you also sit for two hours in the stadium at 2 degrees Celsius and never once see the net move.
But at the end, when the children leave with a big smile, say that the experience was great and they can't wait for the next time, it's worth it all.
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