Maccabi’s head coach Giannis Sfairopoulos after the 88:77 loss to Maccabi Rishon Lezion in Israeli Cup quarter finals: “I’m responsible for this and I will find all the reasons for why we’re not ready”
“Today we didn’t perform as we wanted”, said Coach Giannis Sfairopoulos. “We didn’t perform to our level it’s obvious that we were not mentally ready to fight hard first of all and then to do all the tactic things that we planned for this game. We started the game really bad with a lot of turnovers, six as far I remember in the first period but I believe the second period was disaster they scored 31 points, it’s clear that offensively we didn’t have a clear idea of what to do, we didn’t have good options and defensively we didn’t play good”.
“It’s obvious more than anything that we lost all the small battles defensively and offensively”, coach Sfairopoulos added. “The opponent showed that they wanted the game more than us and that really concerns me, I’m responsible for this and I will do everything to find the reasons why we’re not ready. We knew it’s an important game, that this is a knockout game and we really wanted to continue in the cup unfortunately we didn’t perform as we should to win this game and for this reason I want to apologize to our fans”.
“We didn’t come out aggressive, all the players and we let them get comfortable”, said John DiBartolomeo. “The teams are talented once they get it going they get confidence they become harder to stop and we didn’t do enough on either end to make our own presence felt”.
