Beitar Jerusalem will look to keep pace with Hapoel Beer Sheva when they face Maccabi Tel Aviv on Saturday night (8:30pm) at Bloomfield Stadium in a huge battle as the Israel Football League season nears its end with only a few matches remaining. On Friday, Beer Sheva defeated Hapoel Tel Aviv 2-0 to open up a 5-point gap atop the table.

Although Beitar has had a solid record against Maccabi this season with a pair of dominant wins and a goalless draw, they’ll need to find way to work their magic against the yellow-and-blue once again in order to stay in the championship race.

However, it won’t be an easy task as interim Head Coach Kenny Miller knows full well despite having easily crushed Maccabi Haifa 3-0 earlier in the week, a team that Barak Itzhaki’s squad lost to by the same scoreline just a week earlier at Sammy Ofer Stadium.

“You know, that’s a team that’s going for a league title. I would expect them to come full throttle and play the way that they play,” Miller told The Sports Rabbi at the post match presser following the victory over Haifa.

Itzhaki knows very well that that he can’t count on the first three results including a 6-2 thrashing in Tel Aviv as dictating what will be on Saturday night, “Maccabi Tel Aviv is a team with a lot of quality, a very good team, especially at Bloomfield. Of course it will be a difficult match, like every game in the championship playoff and we’ll need to stay focused in order to go there and take the three points.”

One thing that will plague both sides is fatigue as the league is playing games every 3-4 days due to the Iran war break. It’s clear from the descending quality of play that this has been a factor for every team as the league heads into the final three matchdays and for Maccabi there will for sure be some rotations as well.

“In over a month, you’re playing 10 games,” Miller said. “It’s even more so, really, really intense. So it’s no surprise to see certain games where the levels of teams who you would expect a high performance, it just drops a little bit. Because it is such an intense part of the season that you need to make sure that you’re not asking the same guys to go and go again every three days.”

For Itzhaki and Beitrar, rotating the squad has not been part of his MO and he has relied on a solid core of 7-8 players but he also understands that the fatigue is setting in, “I’m not using fatigue as an excuse, because every team is dealing with fatigue, so it’s something everyone has to cope with. I think that already a week and a half or two weeks ago I said that we would need to find strength, I don’t even know from where but we would need to find it and we need to push ourselves forward. Three matches left until the end, we’re already looking ahead to the game on Saturday at Bloomfield Stadium, hoping for good results.”

Both Itzhaki and Miller were at one point star strikers and have oodles of experience as players but not so much as head coaches with the former just in his second full season and the latter in his first role in charge.

For the Beitar bench boss playing three games a week is intense something that he had not experienced in that role, “Certainly not as a coach, but it’s not just this week, it’s the recent period since the return to the war. Aside from the first two weeks, when there was one game every week, we entered stretches with games in the middle of the week as well, so it became much, much more intense. But it’s okay, in the end you get used to everything.”

As for the Maccabi maestro, the playoffs format where the top teams play each other is something new for him, “I must say, this format is different for me over the course of my career. I think it’s a tough part of the season when you’re playing the best teams every single game. You’re playing the top teams and the games are big, but they’re tough.”

The bottom line is that Beitar is still in the race and the pressure is going tremendous on the Itzhaki, but different than what he had experienced as a player, “I said it before, it’s completely different. Obviously the pressure as a coach is different, because in the end you’re the one standing on the sidelines, the one making the toughest decisions. As a player, there are many other players around you, so the pressure is shared, whereas here everything is on you, for better or worse.”