Hapoel Tel Aviv landed back in Israel Wednesday afternoon as they will ready for Winner Cup action this coming Saturday against Nes Ziona at Yad Eliyahu. The reds will be based in Sofia this coming season due to the security situation in Israel as they will play their home games in the Euroleague in Bulgaria and will fly into the Holy Land for Israeli league contests.

Antonio Blakeney is one of the players who will continue with Head Coach Dimitrios Itoudis’s squad this coming campaign after starring for Hapoel least season. After arriving back in Israel, the guard spoke about coming back to Israel as well as getting ready for the new year.

“It’s good to be back,” the 28-year old began. “We’re working real hard down in Sofia. Now to come back in front of our home fans in Israel is great. We got the whole team here and we have to keep working to get ready for the Euroleague, but these games are just as important, we’re taking everything seriously and we are looking forward to it.”

There are a lot of new faces on the team this coming season and due to the high quality character, Blakeney feels that the integration of the team has been to date fairly simple, “It’s really easy as we have a great group of guys and all the new guys are great character people. From Colin [Malcolm] all down to Elijah [Bryant], Tai [Odiase]. Really everybody, Ziv [Iftach] the new Israeli guard we signed from Holon. Everybody’s character is so great it makes everything easy.”

Of course, with a large squad there will be a lot of players battling it out for playing time, however, that’s not a concern for Blakeney, “For me I always feel like I have to fight for every minute whether it’s 20 players, 15 players or 10 players, I have always been in that situation regardless, so it’s nothing new.”

With the team living in Sofia, there will be plenty of flights to Israel for the domestic league games which doesn’t worry the New York native, “It will be fine, it’s our job and that’s part of the reason we have the twenty man roster, it will be good.”

Blakeney saw plenty of Israel playing at the Eurobasket during training camp and was impressed with what he saw, “I thought the competed well, I think they played well pretty much every game. I watched the game they played against Giannis, Giannis is just like a freak so they couldn’t stop him, no one can stop him and Luka too who had a lot of step back 3’s and hit a lot of tough shots. They competed well every game and represented Israel really well.”