Victory over Chile breeds more hope for national squad
By Moshe Boker
Dror Kashtan is in a bind. His team goes into a five-month break with the sweet taste of victory, and with the sense that this time, any other result besides qualifying for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa will be considered a personal failure.
Since the Euro 2008 qualifying campaign came to an end, Kashtan has chalked up two impressive achievements: a win over Romania and last night's 1-0 win over Chile. It is true that they have been friendlies, but the 25,000 fans who showed up at National Stadium in Ramat Gan yesterday, for a friendly, answered Kashtan's call to come and support the national team. These fans will not forgive him if he does not get Israel into the World Cup.
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Kashtan has one of Israel's most talented national teams ever. We love to remember the golden generation of Haim Revivo, Eyal Berkovic, Avi Nimni and Tal Banin, but there is no doubt that the current squad is perhaps even better.
It has great talent, is young and is unlike the team of Revivo and Berkovic which, despite its great talent, kept itself occupied with ego contests and personal entanglements; they were players who were satiated, not hungry.
Here, Kashtan has a squad with one dominant leader - Yossi Benayoun, who scored the goal last night in the 30th minute - a tight team and many hungry players. Kashtan has another advantage in the fact that a significant percentage of his squad plays in Europe. It is no longer possible to talk about the gap between Israel and the continent when you look at the national team and see players from Liverpool, Chelsea, Barcelona and Bolton - names of big clubs.
And yesterday, this national team played attractive soccer, efficient soccer and we also saw that it is capable of moving the ball around quickly. There is no question that this team has perhaps the best two rear midfielders ever in Gal Alberman and Tamir Cohen, and the entire forward unit - Elyaniv Barda, Barak Yitzhaki, Yossi Benayoun and Omer Golan - plays in Europe.
The national team proved yesterday that it has the talent, it is hungry and now Kashtan needs to prove that he is capable, with the team he has built, of making the proper decisions in the upcoming campaign.
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