Hapoel Tel Aviv’s European journey continues on and while the Reds suffered a 2-1 defeat to Katowice on Wednesday they advanced to the Conference League playoff round with a 3-2 aggregate victory thanks to a 2-0 win in the first leg. Their next stop will be particularly challenging, as they face Italian side Atalanta for a place in the group stage.

At the end of the match, Hapoel Tel Aviv head coach Elyaniv Barda said, “As I said, games like these are played over two halves. We won the first half away from home. We could have done more than 2-0 there and we knew we were coming into the second half of a very difficult tie. We took a 1-0 lead and I think we controlled the game until the 75th minute. Then we lost a bit of confidence, conceded a goal and the second goal came very quickly. In the end, we lost the game, but our goal was to advance to the next round and we’re happy that we achieved that.”

Striker Emmanuel Boateng added, “We started the game very well and completely controlled the first half. Unfortunately, the second half was more difficult. We came into a very tough game after winning the first leg and we knew we had a difficult task ahead of us. But the most important thing is that we advanced and I’m very happy about that.”