Ran Ben Shimon Rallies Shocked National Team After Heavy Defeat to Ireland
Following a 3-0 defeat to Ireland, Israel coach Ran Ben Shimon rallied his shocked national team players, canceling rest plans to hold a morning training session in Debrecen.
Ran Ben Shimon decided overnight to hold a morning training session for the national team on Monday, despite an earlier decision to cancel all activities in Debrecen and keep players in their rooms to digest Sunday's pitch performance.
Immediately following the 3-0 defeat to Ireland, Ben Shimon gathered the players in the stadium locker room and shouted: "As long as I am here, there will be no falling apart among us. It is easiest now to blame each other, speak against one another, send anonymous arrows, and destroy everything we have built here for almost two years. We did something beautiful here. True, you cannot see it in the last two games, but we will fix it. We will fix it on Thursday against Kosovo and make it up against Ireland on Sunday for what happened here on the pitch. We will not tear ourselves apart and we will not disintegrate from within. We will protect what we did here, what we built here for two years."
The atmosphere remained heavy as celebrations and music echoed from the adjacent Irish locker room, underscoring the massive rift between the teams. A national team player remarked at the hotel: "Everyone is in shock. Each of us went through one of the hardest nights of our careers. You cannot even describe in words what we felt at halftime when we walked down to the locker room. It was the most humiliating evening of my career so far."
