In June 1970, the Israeli soccer team appeared for the only time in its history in the World Cup final tournament games held in Mexico.
It was not the last major tournament in which the Israeli soccer team appeared (there were also the Olympic Games in 1976), but it is considered the last tournament and perhaps the only one in which the national team participated alongside the biggest teams in the world, and the final tournament of Mexico 70 is considered one of the best and finest of the World Cups, they say that even Best.
Since then, in Israel the term "Mexico 70" has become a lofty, almost utopian concept, certainly inaccessible.
The sports media is counting the years for the Israeli public: 20, 30, recently 50 and we have already reached 53 years in which Maccabi Tel Aviv won basketball in the European Champions Cup, Yael Arad won the first Olympic medal in blue and white, followed by gold medals and recently two in one Olympics , world championships have been achieved, there are sporting achievements and even the Israeli soccer teams have come a long way in the continent's factories.
Only the Israeli national football team, with its great stubbornness, remained behind.
And since Israeli football joined Europe in the early 1990s and the task of reaching a big and prestigious tournament (the European Championship finals tournament is one too), became more difficult, that achievement, like monuments to mythological battles, is fading.
Again we were helped by luck in the raffles.
Israel national team players (Photo: Barney Ardov)
Recently, there is talk about the current Israeli national team as a team that is able to reproduce that achievement, shatter the myth, set a new standard.
True, only 16 teams played in the 1970 World Cup and 48 teams will play in the North American World Cup in 2026;
The European Championship has grown from 16 teams in 1996 - when Israel first participated in the qualifiers - to 24, but the number of attempts to reach has also increased immeasurably.
In the World Cup qualifying tournament in 1970, from which Israel qualified, a total of 6 teams participated, today 23 teams out of 55 countries on the continent qualify, some of which are not even sovereign countries.
So what makes us think that this time it is possible?
Well, the similarities.
Let's start with the team's last achievement that happened in November 2022, just six months ago.
Israel qualified for Tier A of the League of Nations, where teams such as Spain, Italy, Denmark, Portugal, Belgium, Germany, France and the Netherlands are included.
Israel is there, England is not.
really.
How did this miracle happen?
The Israeli national team qualified from a tier B group in which Iceland and Albania participated.
It also included Russia, the top team at home, but it was suspended because of the invasion of Ukraine.
In the qualifiers for Mexico 1970, Israel was included in the house with North Korea and New Zealand.
North Korea reached the quarter-finals of the World Cup in England 4 years earlier, knocking out Italy.
Her placement with Israel, a country with which she has no diplomatic relations, caused her to withdraw.
If Israel had been required to play against North Korea, in two games on neutral soil (as Australia did in 1966), it seems that it would not have been able to pass even the early stage.
So let's put it this way: sometimes you need luck in lotteries.
By the way, there is also a second chapter here.
Alon Hazan was appointed to coach the team about a year ago.
The team was coached by David Schweitzer, Yosl'a Mirmovich, Itzik Schnior, Yankel'a Grundman, Shlomo Sharaf, Avraham Grant, Dror Kashtan, Eli Gutman and Elisha Levy, all of them came to the team after a respectable record of championships and cups in the senior league, after a long career or short - of successes, some at the height of their success.
There is no doubt that Alon Hazan is the Israeli coach with the worst coaching record in the Premier League since Mexico 70. He coached a total of 3 seasons in the Premier League, 57 games he was on the sidelines, and since his work at MS Ashdod - the only team he coached - was terminated, he has not returned to coaching in the league, and moved to coach in the football association.
The Israel-Mexico 70 national team was led by Emmanuel Shafer, whose coaching career in clubs cannot be said to be successful.
He did coach 8 seasons in the top league, but not really seasons.
7 times he did not finish a season, and stood on the lines a total of 108 times.
Still, he led the team to the Olympic quarterfinals and a respectable performance in Mexico '70.
But it's not uncommon.
All over the world there are dozens of national team coaches whose record in teams is extremely weak, if at all.
Most of them grew up as national team coaches.
There is also an explanation for this: a team coach meets with his players every day, outlines a path and discipline, manages a squad, and sometimes has to settle for the squad that the budget can achieve.
Not everyone who asks will receive.
In the national team, almost absolutely, the coach can determine who will be in his squad.
In the national team, the coach meets with his players once in a while, for a limited number of training sessions.
They come from the teams ready and if it remains to choose the first team from them, emphasize the principles of the game, work on stationary situations and know how to manage them in a much calmer, and very temporary, environment.
In other words, a team coach is not necessarily a national team coach.
The Israeli coach with the worst coaching record in the Premier League.
Alon Hazan (Photo: Barney Ardov)
And a national team coach has an advantage if he came from the bottom, from the young national teams, worked as a national team coach even earlier, had success, raised generations of players, and could use them.
And in this sense, the similarity between Shafer and Cantor is great.
Shaffer received the coaching of the youth team in 1963 and worked with it for 4 years, during which it won three times in a row (twice jointly with Burma/Myanmar) in the Asian Championship.
Most of the players who passed under him in the youth team also later played in Mexico in the 70's.
Let's put it this way, of the 22 players who were on the Israeli national team in Mexico '70, only the third goalkeeper Yair Nosovsky, Rahamim Talbi and Dani Shmilo-Rom, did not pass under his hands in the youth teams.
Hazan began working as the coach of the B-boys team back in 2009, coaching players who are now 30 years old. From there he advanced to the youth team and from there to the junior team, which he led on the way to the first qualification for the European Championship since 2007 (the one who qualified in the end was Guy Luzon who succeeded him in the middle of the campaign , with the appointment of Hazan as coach of the senior team).
Amazing, but in the team's composition in the last game there are 5-6 players who grew up with him in the national teams and in total there are between 15 and 20 senior players who passed under his hands, who can play in the team at any time.
Hazan decided to dramatically rejuvenate the team.
In the last match against Kosovo, three players born in the 21st century played, out of a total of six squad players under the age of 23. The most notable is Oskar Gloch who played in the national team even before the age of 19. The assumption is that when the young team finishes its performances in the European Championship final tournament in June, also a number The young players in the team will grow, so will the youth team that will play in the World Championship under the age of 20 in Argentina, next month.
In Mexico '70, Israel was the team with the most players under the age of 23 - seven, the youngest team in the championship.
Names such as Shraga Bar, Mikko Blue, Zvika Rosen, Shmulik Rosenthal, Yitzhak Shum, Giora Spiegel and Shia Feigenbaum - all seven - also started in the national team's successful matches against Uruguay, Sweden and Italy.
And it is important to say, young players play if they are good, and indeed, the achievements on the continent of the youth teams in recent years - runners-up in the European Youth Championship, qualification for the European Championship for young teams - are reminiscent of the achievements of the youth teams in Asia in those years.
The rest of the players worked for them.
Spiegel (Photo: Government Press Office, Moshe Milner)
And there was also the way to choose actors and the way they were told.
Emanuel Shafer chose the two stars of the era - Mutal'a Spiegler and Giora Spiegel - and surrounded them with hardworking players who, even when they were offensive players, knew how to do the work of defense, take players personally, work for the stars and largely for the national team and the country - that's how they used to play.
He took the rest of the stars not as an alternative, but as a reserve, they could never replace the big stars with him, unless they were injured or removed.
A big star at that time like Eli Ben Rimoush hardly ever played for him, and he didn't take Yitzhak Englander and Ronny Calderon to the World Cup, because he didn't get along with them.
At the same time, he brought back from retirement Danny Shmilo-Rom, who was the greatest athlete in the team of very athletic players - Jloves as the saying of the time - players who could respond to European football, the one that was bigger than us at the time, and in the World Cup - for one magical moment - they didn't feel it.
The Israeli national team played at home with the European and South American champions and lost only once.
Both by the way reached the semi-finals, and Italy even reached the final.
The match against Mola in the World Cup ended 0:0.
Alon Hazan - making an impression - is also building the team around Manor Solomon and Oskar Gloch, two great stars who have been playing abroad from a very young age. Solomon left at the age of 19 for Ukraine, and is now already in the best league in the world, and Gloch recently left for Austria, before the age of 19 , and he will still reach the best league in the world. Hazan is loyal to players without ego, provided they are loyal to him and his way. Big stars - Eran Zahavi or Omar Atzil - recently found themselves outside the squad because they didn't get along with him or the standards of the team, which gives the impression that And you become tougher and under greater disciplinary restrictions, as Shafer's team was.
Will it pay off to build the team around him?
Gloch (photo: Kobi Eliyahu)
As mentioned, the Israeli national team qualified for Mexico 70, as a result of North Korea withdrawing, its second opponent was the weak New Zealand that played against Israel twice at the Ramat Gan Stadium, after arriving here in the humidity from the New Zealand winter when the players wear woolen shirts.
The opponent for the ticket to the World Cup was Australia, which before that was required to play four games against South Korea and Japan and another three games against Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), the last of which, in Mozambique, took place five days before its first game in Ramat Gan.
While Australia played nine qualifying matches, and only one of them in Australia, Israel played only four, only one outside of Israel.
Israel's advantage was clear.
The current team won the most favorable draw in the Euro 2024 qualifiers, roughly since Mexico 70: Switzerland, the grayest team from the senior level, Romania, which is in constant decline, Kosovo, which is an inexperienced team on the international level, and also Belarus, which is exiled from its country, and Andorra, which is adrift.
Two teams will qualify for the European Championship from each home, and although Israel opened the qualifiers with a disappointing home draw against the Kosovans and a defeat in Switzerland, most of the decisive games will be held next season, when Hazan will have almost all the players he wants, young and some veterans.
The chance that the Israeli national team will qualify for Euro 2024 is the greatest since Mexico 70.
It is possible that next year they will sum up 54 years of failure, and realize that sometimes you have to arrange the stars - coaches who grew up in national teams, a young generation, structure and discipline - according to past precedent.
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