Bnei Sakhnin did not make a name for herself as a club that was easy to sign in and became a coach. There are few cases in which coaches have lasted beyond the season, sometimes even if the results are not bad. Meanwhile, Chaim Sylves Manages to keep his throne, despite a summer full of uncertainty, despite leading the club to an appearance in the top playoffs. Four rounds into the season Sakhnin is ranked fourth with 7 points, despite a difficult draw for the start of 2022/23. Just before he leaves for Turner for the meeting against Hapoel Be’er Sheva, Haim Silves was a guest on the “On the Lines” podcast with Eyal Lachman and provided a glimpse into the everyday life of a coach in the Premier League.
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“I’m not here to say ‘appreciate me more, I have a hard job, how poor I am,'” Silves said about the demands of the position of coach in the Premier League, “this job doesn’t leave you, it travels with you all the time. It’s a part of you, you Always thinking, always inside, anything can inspire you. My mind is like WIFI, anything can turn me on. Everyone says they like to learn, but the trick is knowing where to learn.”
“You have to think about how you improve a player, think about the weak point of the opponent, about how you hide your weak point. Once you are in that zone, once you like the team and not in some defensive line with background noise, then it’s there. It’s like asking Draw ‘How did you draw that?’. It jumps out at you, when you’re in the zone, the ideas come. You don’t know if it’s brilliance until it succeeds. How do you find peace? It’s a matter of a lot of experience. If you know how to sift through things that struck you at first, you see that suddenly a result changes the talk about you.”
It is clear that the role of the coach is important, but Silves knows not to exaggerate his value: “The coach is a very important figure and leads everything, but you must always remember that you are at the service of the team and not yourself. You have to know how to flow and make adjustments to the drift and not constantly try to invent something new. I feel that a coach Graduates in the Premier League should be a coach of a team and not of players. When you are in Maccabi Haifa or Maccabi Tel Aviv then this range is relatively simple.”
Sylves also let us in on his game plan against Netanya (0:0): “Maccabi Netanya came to us for the last game on Saturday, I saw that Netanya startles the opponent with its pressure, and if the other team is not ready for it, then it constantly reacts. My idea It was trying to make the game go where we want, for Tania to respond to us. The game happened exactly what we wanted to happen. It didn’t happen by chance. This is not about genius, you share the idea with the team. In this particular game Biram was above Kartsev, so there was a feeling that Sakhnin had an advantage certain about Netanya”.
The coach also tried to go against his branding as a defensive coach: “This is absolutely not true. My goal is to produce a very diverse mindset in my team. A link trio can make a longitudinal movement or a lateral movement. I want them to know how to do that. Wing players are length players, The long movement is comfortable for them. In midfield, you need diversity, their movements are both length and width. Sherry is like that, a length and width player who is difficult to deal with. It is impossible to stop him. You cannot keep him personally because he himself does not know where he will run.”
In the first, a difficult game awaits him, in Turner against Eliniv Barda’s team: “I don’t like to prepare for teams like BS, the ones that change. I don’t stick to a formation of three defenders, I didn’t play like that in Hapoel Haifa for example. It depends on the strength of your group. I want to make the opposing team think all the time.” And what about the third side in the Israeli top? “Fritza, Jovanovic, Zahavi and Gloch? I don’t think all four together can work out. I understand the idea Ivitch is making. Don’t know if it will bring a championship or not, it’s a very early stage. Gloch is a player who has a special role, you can’t lock him up but give him freedom. He can be under the striker.”
Sylves is also one of the coaches who emphasizes mental preparation for games: “It’s 90 percent. There is a problem today with attention and concentration, you have to be very concise and efficient, spread out the meetings properly. It’s impossible to do everything at the same time, both professionally and mentally. As a player it was very difficult for me To absorb things on the day of the game, I always try to combine my desires as a coach with what I would like as a player. Many times I ask myself ‘what would I like to hear from the coach now’. This is what guides me regarding the timing of decisions. The mental touch is super critical in the preparation for the game.” .
“I leave myself room for authenticity, it makes the player in front of you believe you,” Silves added at the end, “You can’t learn it, and I don’t think I know how to do it the best, but I leave it. If I have a chance to convey a mental message , he must be authentic. Your instinct is exactly the difference between you and another coach who would have been standing there. As a player I was human scum, light years away from what I am today as a coach. We are in a different place today, but even today I sin quite a bit.”