I had this great intro written the other day, I waxed lyrical about our promotion to the Israeli Premier League and how much of a challenge it would be. But I saved it on my work computer on not in the cloud so I don’t have access to it now. I think I will save it for when we reach the Champions League, it was a bit OTT for just getting promotion anyway!
Anyway, so here we are finally in Ligat Tel Aviv Stock Exchange after 7 season. First things first as I briefly mentioned last time out we have turned professional. What does that mean? Well the wage bill has gone up. We are currently spending just under £7Kp/w which has risen from around 3Kp/w last season. We are still within budget. The budget was massively helped by the TV rights, which came in at a whopping £1million.
Another side effect of the TV rights windfall was we met one of our club vision items 3 years ahead of schedule. It gives us more financial clout to challenge on the pitch and build our infrastructure. The board finally allowed us to have some scouts. We employed a few and sent them on their merry way to find us some talent.
We shelled out £4.5K, our record signing on a centre back Stav Shalev. His heading isn’t great for a centre back, although he has decent jumping reach! But other than that he has settled in well. Hopefully we can sign more players of quality. As I found last year, trialists are allowed to play in the league, I have utilised that this season. There are plenty of Brazilians that are willing to sign for us so I have been giving trials to a few of these at a time. Some of them are fairly good, but since we are only allowed 5 foreign players in the starting 11 I has been reticent to sign too many of them.
As usual the bookies do not give us a chance. I think only Leicester have had higher odds! Maybe that is a good sign.
Even though we spent nearly two million on a new stadium a few years back, the rules for the Premier League say we need a 4000 seat stadium. So for the second time in the save we have moved into rented accommodation. This time the Givat Ram Hebrew University Athletics Stadium in Jerusalem. A stadium with a 10,000 capacity. This allowed us to break our attendance record in a Toto Cup group stage game against our bitter rivals Beitar Jerusalem. We lost! We were drawn against Beitar in the cup at home, and played in front of a sell-out 10 thousand crowd. This time we won!
We started off the season as expected, finding it difficult to get a result. I changed the formation from 442 diamond wide to a straight 442, hopefully this would create a bit more solidity to the side. We still had a few support and attacking roles, and as you will see our fortunes eventually turned around after our cup victory against Beitar.
Before we get to that, we had a bit of an injury crisis. Two of our players ended up with Coronavirus! And at one stage we had the most injuries in the league. I guess full time training for the first time in 8 years was eventually having an effect on the fitness situation. We hadn’t had many injuries up to now, but we are seeing an increase now. On the flip side the daily training has seen a marked improvement in our player’s stats. Or Ben-David, the captain, has increased across the board. Plenty of the other players have seen their stats increase too. Who would have thought that training everyday would make players better! If the board had seen this a few years back the squad would be much better than they are now. Hopefully as we continue to improve our training facilities, and coaches the players will be able to reach their full potentials and we can build a squad full of talented footballers.
Back to the results! As previously shown, we didn’t start the season in the best form. At the halfway stage of the season (well 15 games in anyway – the league splits after 26 games, with a further 7 or 10 games depending on whether we end up in the top 6 or bottom 8), we were languishing in the relegation zone. I knew it would be hard this season, it was definitely proving to be so. We were drawn at home against Beitar Jerusalem in the Cup, which we ended up winning 3-0. After that victory we have managed to win the next 7 matches, (including another cup win to put us into the semi-finals). The run has included Dan Gross managing to score 10 goals in a 3 game spell, which has propelled him to the top of the scoring charts. I am going to take most of the credit for my tactical adjustment, although it took a few games to get it right we look like the familiarity has clicked and the players are really performing as well as they can.
Our exceptional run of form has seen us move up to 8th place, we are 10 points off 6th which would see us in the Championship playoff league. I think that is probably too much to ask. I would be happy to remain in mid table.
FM RioSantos 