Search: ' Hapoel Jerusalem'

A German player refuses to play against Israel – because he was born in Iran. But Ashkan Dejagah, who has dual nationality, has picked up sympathy in some unexpected places, as Paul Joyce explains

Tattooed on the neck of VfL Wolfsburg midfielder Ashkan Dejagah is the motto “Never forget where you’re from”. On his right forearm is the word “Teheran”, the German spelling of the city where he was born in 1986; on his left “Berlin”, where he grew up and played for Hertha. Not that anyone will forget where he comes from after he withdrew from a Germany Under-21 game against Israel in Tel Aviv in October. “There are political reasons for this,” he told the paper Bild. “Everyone knows I’m a German-Iranian.”

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Roman Abramovich and Avram Grant go back a long way, says Shaul Adar

José Mourinho would not have expected the Israel v Ireland World Cup qualifier of March 2005 to have a significant impact on his future. But that was the weekend when Israel’s coach, Avram Grant, was first offered a job by his FA’s guest of honour, Roman Abramovich. Israel had just achieved respectable 1-1 home draws with France and Ireland and an impressed Abramovich told Grant that he would buy whichever Israeli club the coach wanted to take charge of. Grant just smiled, apparently not believing that the Russian was making a serious offer.

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With local club Hapoel lurching from crisis to embarrassment, left-leaning fans in the Israeli capital had had enough. Shaul Adar reports on their decision to start again after failing in a takeover bid

In May, Uri Sheradsky, the sports editor for a Jerusalem local paper, wrote a column in the weekly edition. There was only one subject on his mind. While Beitar Jerusalem won their first championship for nine years, his team, Hapoel Jerusalem, were dropping down limply to the third ­division for the first time.

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  An attempt to measure racism in the politically charged world of Israeli football appears to be back-firing, reports Shaul Adar

With Maccabi Haifa on their way to a third consecutive championship, the Israeli league isn’t the most exciting, bar daily news about Russian oligarchs pumping in money. But every Monday another Israeli football league is a source of drama and shocks. Every week, 50 observers from New Israel Fund, an über-liberal institution for promoting democratic values, go to the premier league grounds and file reports on racist chanting. All those chants are calculated by a complicated mathematical equation based on the severity of the events, their length and the number of fans taking part; they end up negative points published in a league table.

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Shaul Adar reports on a team that has inspired hope and relief in a beleagured Israel

It has been an annus horribilis, for Israel in general and for Israeli football in particular. On one recent Saturday evening, during the broad­­cast of a live game from the local league, a suicide attack took place in an Orthodox part of Jerusalem. For 12 minutes the shocked view­ers could see the game continuing on one third of the screen, while the other two thirds carried live pictures from the carnage scene.

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