Hapoel Beer Sheva fell to Royale Union Saint-Gilloise 4-0 in UEFA Europa League play as they saw their record drop to two losses and a draw after the opening three matches of the competition. The southern reds played their rivals toe-to-toe for the opening half but just ahead of the break Itay Rotman tripped up Rail Florucz in the box which handed the latter a penalty that was promptly slotted home for a 1-0 lead at halftime.

The Belgians doubled the advantage when Guilherme Smith’s shot went off of Rotman and beat keeper Ofir Marciano lead in the 60th minute while Dylan Aquino added the third marker of the game just under twenty minutes later for a 3-0 lead. Smith bumped up the lead to 4-0 via Smith to close out the match.

Beer Sheva Head Coach Ran Kozuk summarized the loss, “A very disappointing result. We played good football in the first half and were even the better team on the pitch, but at this level, you can’t create chances and go into halftime trailing. In the second half, we ran out of steam, couldn’t keep possession and got dragged into the tempo the Belgians dictated. The players who came off the bench didn’t give us the boost we needed, even though they should have. I think we fell short physically in a big way.”

Keeper Ofir Marciano looked back at the loss, “The result is definitely not what we wanted and it’s a bad result for us. We did a lot of good things in the first half. This is a journey we’re going through this season against some very challenging teams and we’ll need to find solutions and do better than we did against AZ Alkmaar. We’ll have to learn from this. The second half shouldn’t have looked like that. We weren’t good enough in the areas close to our goal, where we needed to be more aggressive. That’s something we have to fix.”