Slavic failure in Israel because of communication? Only two Czechs in the line-up

Slavia failed to win the third match of the group stage of the Conference Europa League and left Haifa with a 0:1 defeat. Only a few players from last year’s team, or rather only two players of Czech nationality, remain.

Slavia entered the match with a rather unexpected line-up. After a good performance against Slovan Liberec, Michael Krmenčík dropped out of the line-up and was replaced by Srdjan Plavšič, while the obviously tired Ibrahim Traoré came in at the expense of the fresh Daniel Samek.

The result was an eleven that included only two players from the Czech Republic, Ondřej Kolář and Jan Kuchta. Taking into account the similarity of Czech and Slovak, Ivan Schranz was still 100% in agreement with the aforementioned pair.

The rest of the line-up was made up of eight foreigners of eight different nationalities, which could have caused communication problems. Of course, the players know each other from training sessions and can understand English, but there is a big difference in match speed to communicate in the mother tongue and a foreign language.

Srdjan Plavsic hasn’t really gotten to grips with the team yet, and on Thursday he wasn’t at all good at defending. Also due to the language barrier, he was missing on the left side when the goal was scored. He deservedly came on at half-time.

The argument about communication may seem ridiculous, but if we look at Slavia’s Europa League journey last year, there were seven to eight Czechs in the line-up regularly. At the moment, Sšiovans have nine injured players (apart from Ladislav Takács, all of them are representing the Czech Republic).

The fact that eight of the fourteen players from Thursday’s game have not played in the red and white for a year also detracts from the chemistry. Jindřich Trpišovský is thus waiting impatiently for his mainstays to help in many ways after returning from injury.

Source: UEFA