USL Super Y-League North American Finals Feature
Monday, December 5, 2011
By NICHOLAS MURRAY
BRANDON, Fla. – Since the tournament’s inception, the USL Super Y-League North American Finals has had a featured contest between two of its top clubs. Held on Saturday night, this year’s match between the Florida Soccer Alliance and Black Watch SC continued the tradition of the Showcase Game with a high-tempo contest that ended with honors even.
For the first time this season, though, USL added a new feature to the event in the form of an international showcase. The seeds for this event were sown a year ago, when Maccabi Haifa head scout Alon Harazi was a guest speaker at the USL Annual General Meeting. This year, Harazi brought the Israeli club’s Academy side to the event, allowing the young players competing in the tournament to watch, and hopefully learn, from a top-level exhibition.
“Alon and I decided it would be good if we could get Maccabi Haifa to come in, their U17 squad, so that was where it all started,” USL National Technical Director Peter Mellor said. “Obviously, to bring this level of game into the championships is really to show our participant players and parents just what the professional level is about from an international perspective and to me that helps develop the mentality and understanding of where we’re at, and where the game is really at in terms of the top clubs in the world.”
Maccabi Haifa’s senior side has played exhibition games in the United States before, 1996 being the first occasion, but this was the first trip to the U.S. for its academy side, most of whom are 17 years old. In addition to the exhibition at the Super Y-League Finals, they are also going to compete later this month in the IMG Cup, a prestigious international tournament held at Bradenton’s IMG Academy, the home of the USL Olympic Development Program camp and now the USL PRO Combine.
With a wide scouting network that brings players from all backgrounds into their academy system at the age of around 12 or 13 years old, Harazi said playing international competition is an important part in the club’s development philosophy.
“From U13 we are starting to develop the players and try to help them recognize football from other countries, get them in tournaments,” Harazi said. “We fly to Europe and play tournament to understand what it’s going to be like to play out of the country. We have had good results, we can see that they understand what is waiting for them in the future, let them have some experience, and we can see improvement every time.”
Certainly, the squad that Maccabi brought to Florida was a strong one, and more than a match for its opponent from the Suncoast Premier League, Brandon Town FC. Shoval Gozlan and Dor Cohav each scored twice in an easy 7-0 victory, but the result on the night didn’t matter as much as watching the way the Haifa players moved off the ball and found each other with well-placed, incisive passes.
“The quality of the passes, that’s where the speed is,” Mellor said. “Speed of play isn’t how fast you run, it’s how fast you move the ball, and what we’ve seen tonight is a clinic of how to move the ball quickly. But it’s not just the player on the ball that has impressed me tonight, it’s the players off the ball who, the moment the player on the ball gets the ball, moves into passing lanes. There are always options for the player on the ball, and that’s what the speed of play is so quick.”
Seeing up close the levels of passing and movement Maccabi Haifa exhibited is something Mellor hopes the young players in attendance would learn from and add to their games when they return to their clubs at the conclusion of the week-long tournament.
“That’s where youngsters should see how important it is, off the ball, to look, find passing lanes or bounce off and give the player on the ball options,” Mellor said.
After the success of Sunday night’s event, Mellor said he hoped it can continue to be a feature of future Super Y-League Finals, with the potential for one of the USL’s PDL clubs to be featured against an international opponent such as Maccabi Haifa in the future. With the VisionPro Academy joining the league in 2012 in Tampa Bay, and Orlando City taking control of the Central Florida Kraze last week, it would certainly seem to be a logical next step in making the International Showcase as big a part of the week-long tournament as it’s Saturday night counterpart has been.
“This, to me, would be a great match-up for a PDL team,” Mellor said. “Even though Maccabi are mostly 17-year-olds, they are full-time professionals really and I think it would lead to a very, very competitive game with some of our PDL teams.”