Every good story has an unexpected character. Apparently at the beginning she is not talked about at all, every now and then she appears in some half-scene with an amusing sentence and at the moment of truth she is suddenly there: appearing in full glory, saving the hero and making sure you don’t forget her, even after you have closed the book or turned off the screen. If we accept this for Hapoel Beer Sheva model 2022/23 there is one main player who can meet this definition – Rotem Hatuel.
Maccabi Tel Aviv and Maccabi Haifa received the main focus in the summer transfer window and many are convinced that both will run to the end in the championship fight, but Hapoel BS also worked hard in the summer to make sure that the battle for the plate would be a three-header. A lot of money was poured into a number of intriguing players, Tomer Hamed Returned to Israel in a very surprising and fatal move? He just finished a season of three league goals and nine in all competitions. Even now it can be said that he has not yet become a regular team player, but there is no doubt that as of the end of October he is the ace up Eliniv Barda’s sleeve.
The numbers are crazy by any measure. Hatuel has scored five league goals so far this season in only nine games, only three of which he started in the lineup. The red number 77 scores a goal every 77.6 minutes and if you also add the two assists then he is involved in a goal every 55.4 minutes when he is on the grass. These five goals were scored by Hatuel from only 15 threats on goal which means he needs three threats to find the net. For the sake of comparison: Omer Atzili, the league’s current top scorer, scores every 5.8 threats on goal, Djorja Jovanovic finds the net every 6.6 and Itamar Shabiru every 4.
The firepower that Hapoel B.S. has in the front, as mentioned, leads to Hatuel mainly coming off the bench, and so it turned out that out of all his ten goals in all formats, only one was scored in the first half: 1:4 against Hapoel Jerusalem. The striker played only 43 percent of the total The Reds’ minutes in the league, but he is involved in 35 percent of all their goals and besides his goals secured five league points: two equalizing goals against Sektia Nes Ziona and Hapoel Haifa and a winning goal against Bnei Sakhnin).
Hatuel has many qualities that make him an offensive threat. On the one hand, he is a winger with good one-on-one skills and excellent dribbling. At the same time, he excels in moving into the box and finding the free space in it to reach a dangerous situation. The red striker is also very diverse in his threats on the goal: of his 15 threats in the league, 8 were with a touch (4 of the 5 goals he scored were also with a touch), but 6 were with two touches or more. The five goals he scored in the league are divided into two with his right foot, two with his left and one with a strike. Everything from everything.
So let’s start with what the striker knows how to do when he has the ball. As written earlier, Hatuel is a good dribbler and this season he is the second player who dribbled the most among the BS players after Efi Suleimanov with 14/28 successful dribbles. Hatuel does not often dribble on a small area and close to the foot but instead sends the ball forward and tries to earn it while relies on his speed and control of his body. Against Bnei Sakhnin you can see an example of this in which he uses both feet and throws the defensive players off balance:
Against this must be placed his ability to keep the ball even with his back, as in the goal he scored in the 2:2 against Hapoel Haifa: Hatuel’s first possession of the ball was not successful. Attempting a kick on the left could be problematic because he would have closed until he would have reached an ideal position for the kick, so instead he turns on Dodi Twito, gaining time and space for the kick. Nice goal.
With all due respect to his ability with the ball, what makes Hatuel a truly dangerous attacking player is the way he finds the open spaces in the box and creates them for himself. The goal he scored 1:3 against Lugano in the Conference League qualifiers was an excellent example of this, so the striker took a step back inside the box which confused his keeper and attacked the area exactly on the cross ball that Hatem Abdelhamid passed.
The winning goal in 1:2 against Netanya was also scored thanks to Hatuel’s ability to move without the ball. A short pass to Shafi, identifying the bad exit of Raz Shlomo to attack the ball and entering the hole that opened up as a result. Although it was not counted as an assist because Shay Elias scored on a rebound from his own kick, but the part of number 77 was just as big.
There is no doubt that both in the current season and under Eliniv Berda, Hapoel BS’s main weapon is the stationary situations: 19 threats to the goal were recorded by the Reds from stationary situations in the league (not including direct free kicks and penalties), six of which turned into a goal. If last season it was Miguel Vitor And Nikita Rukavica, who were the main targets for the balls sent by Ramzi Spori, this season Hatuel, along with Tomer Hamed, entered this vacuum and the numbers accordingly.
We said that BS scored six goals from stationary situations in the league, right? So three of them were scored by Hatuel and he scored them with four threats on the goal. In the goal against Beitar Jerusalem, you can see how with the help of his incessant movement and the identification of the weak link – Ofir Kariaf – the striker succeeds in reaching a situation where he is completely free. Pushing the Beitar captain to the left corner of the goal, changing direction in a fraction of a second and an accurate shot in. Great goal.
In order to make the dream of going all the way in the league together with Maccabi Haifa and Maccabi Tel Aviv, the Turner game will be very fateful for Hapoel BS, especially considering the fact that they have already lost to the champion at home and one more for the Yellows will create a very difficult gap to close nine points from the top. Will Hatuel be there again to prevent a fatal fall?
