Nikola Vujcic: “We cannot support violence and racism”

“It was sad to see this kind of actions of violence and racism”, said Maccabi’s legend and GM, Nikola Vujcic. “I think what saddens me the most is that the associations in Israel start to support this kind of stuff, if you see the game and the reactions of the security guys almost apologized to the guy that attacked our physio guys, no one reacted; I personally went to the chief of security and told him why is this guy standing behind our people take him out, and he said: ‘no no I can’t take him out’. I was surprised to see today that the same guy got punished theoretically one week for violence, even four months it is vacation until the Israeli start. It’s the same guy that Sofo (i.e. Sofoklis Schortsianitis) fought with because he cursed his family. We still have the league administration to make decisions, I’m sure that they are aware that violence cannot continue in sports, if Hapoel Tel Aviv beat us on the court, basketball wise like they did before – we congratulate them, this is what we want. Most likely going to face each other in the playoffs.

“We don’t need any kind of violence”, Nikola added. “This is damaging our brand, our sport, and we should be able to bring the kids and families to watch the games and not be afraid of coming to the gym, but for sure as a club we also showed too much tolerance towards violence of other fans, especially there. We cannot allow racism calling all the players with the ‘N-word, Monkeys and wishing them to die’. we’re in the 21st century and we cannot support violence and racism, and not only that – a guy standing behind the bench an saying it one meter away and the guys is still allowed to come to the gyms, this will not end well”.

“When you go to play a game the protagonists are the players”, said coach Giannis Sfairopoulos. “We need to let the players play the game and we need to protect the game to be played inside the four lines and this goes to everybody and I think that this didn’t happen in that game. If you go to do your job and you risk yourself to provocations, spitting and hits by the fans then we cannot talk about sport and about basketball. If what happened to our physiotherapist happened in the Greek league the referee would stop the game and send the teams to the locker room and in this game the away team wins the game 20:0 immediately because you cannot hit somebody, if a member of the team got hit from anything even from a lighter- game is over”.

When asked if he would advise Maccabi to leave the court in case of recurring events, coach Sfairopoulos replied: “I cannot advise Maccabi, Maccabi is above me and all of us, we are all together of course but it’s the owners’ decision, we are all together and whatever they will decide – we are with them and we know they are with us we are a family and it’s whatever they will say and decide. We need to change the page, we won this game and it was really important that we won this game with all these conditions against us, now we need to focus on the Ashdod game, a team that is very different from the rest of the teams  in the Israeli league they have their own style, they are very dangerous and if they find their scoring rhythm they can score 40 points in one period, we saw this a lot of times so we need to be ready and not allow it against us”.     

“We got a season of practice of it”, said Jake Cohen. “Playing games in short notice that’s what we do here in Maccabi, we’ve got a lot of practice with this sort of thing. I think our team can take the character we learned from it; a lot of things went against us in those last three minutes and we came out and won in overtime, that wasn’t an easy thing to do; certainly we made a lot of mistakes as well, we can learn from those as well so we have a lot of things we can improve and take from the Hapoel game, our mindset is to win we don’t really care about their situation, we know ours we want to finish in first place we want the home court”.