This has been one season Maccabi Haifa captain Yaniv Katan won't want to remember. There are no few explanations for his season-long slump, yet all boil down to his state of mind. The consensus, as one Haifa figure put it, is that "the emotional burden is pulling him apart professionally."
Katan's career seemed to be soaring, culminating with eight goals and 14 assists in the 2004/05 season. The next year he started out with West Ham United but returned midseason in a loan turned permanent move. Since then his production declined to seven goals and four assists last year and five goals and three assists so far this season.
Advertisement
It's a matter of character, some of his acquaintances say. He is "very sensitive, gets insulted by the slightest thing and takes everything harshly."
More than once people who know him have suggested professional counseling to provide him with tools for dealing with emotional stress. Katan brushed them off. When management joined the chorus a few months ago, they also came up against a wall.
I don't do Pilates
"The word 'psychologist' seems a loaded term to him," a club official said this week. "I take it he thinks it's something bad though there's no doubt it would help."
At a certain point the club suggested he follow in the footsteps of teammates Dekel Keinan and Renato and take a Pilates course, which he also rejected out of hand. "He felt as if it's something that would damage his pride," asserts a teammate.
Until he does find a way to relieve his stress, his team will continue to have to settle for Katan's relatively low results of the past few years. Now it's hard to tell if his evermore lucrative contract inflated him into an overrated star or if he's simply going through an extended crisis, from which no one knows when or how he'll emerge.
The midfielder is not the only one to blame for his team's sagging position, but expectations of him were greater relative to his teammates. They made him captain and gave him a grandiose $480,000 per season contract - that only seems "to have put heavier pressure on him," according to sources in Maccabi. Everybody now knows his shoulders are too narrow for this job, and even he seems to get it.
Coach Roni Levy has tried to solve the problem by calling him in for pep talks, sometimes twice a week. Each time he would leave energized, but his mental batteries would soon run low. "The problem was Roni felt at a certain point he was repeating himself like a broken record," explained the source. "The effectiveness of these talks wore off."
When Levy would stop holding the meetings for a few weeks, Katan would feel left out. He even confided once to a friend he thought the source of half the criticism about him in the press was coach Levy. The pressure increased, and his play on the field declined even further.
Taking it out on the fans
Not only did his relationship with his coach worsen, but he also started losing his temper with his most loyal fan base, the crowd, say figures in the club. One time last year he spat at the stands in Kiryat Eliezer from where fans were cursing the team. Another incident particularly "stupid on his part," according to Haifa officials, happened during a December game against Ashdod S.C. He responded to booing by the crowd with a mouthful of juicy curses.
"Every little thing breaks his concentration on the game," says a member of Maccabi Haifa. "He really takes everything to heart, is insulted quickly and grows moody. If he only knew how to distance himself form these things and focus just on soccer, it would be much easier for him."
However, if there is one thing getting to him more than anything else, it's the jabs his boss Yaakov Shahar takes at him in the press. Katan knows that if there's anything his boss regrets, it's giving him such a lucrative contract upon his return from England.
Shahar called Katan into a long meeting three weeks ago to discuss soccer and Maccabi Haifa. He even shared with Katan his difficulties in selecting a coach for next year, which was meant to show his faith in Katan. However, Katan has found himself these past three weeks in a media storm involving reports that Haifa would be happy to release him if only there were a club willing to pick up his contract. Shahar may not have any objections to these reports, but they only serve to further insult Katan.
Haaretz.com, the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, offers real-time breaking news, opinions and analysis from Israel and the Middle East. Haaretz.com provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel, the Jewish World and the Middle East, including defense, diplomacy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the peace process, Israeli politics, Jerusalem affairs, international relations, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora.
