Hapoel Holon to play its 53rd game of the season tonight

Hapoel Holon will play tonight in the Final of Delasport Balkan League against Akademik Plovdiv. The match will start at 20:00 local time and will be broadcast LIVE on RING Tv in Bulgaria, Sport 5 in Israel and on Delasport Balkan League YouTube channel.

This will be Hapoel's 53rd game of the season for Hapoel. With a quick calculation, that means that we are talking about one game each three and a half days, a schedule like an NBA team. Of course the reason for that is the fact that Hapoel is playing reached the Final 8 of Basketball Champions League, the Winner cup Final, the State cup semifinal and of course all the matches it had in Israeli Winner League.

The one person in charge of navigating the ship is the CEO Roy Dvora who spoke about the experiences this season, like for example playing against Akademik in Plovdiv and having to find a solution after a flight was cancelled in the last moment.

"We already had thoughts of flying with a private flight through Jordan or even Cyprus but suddenly a flight to Istanbul came up and from there we went on a 6-hour bus trip. We crossed the border between Turkey and Bulgaria and at the end we reached the destination," said Dvora.

A month earlier, while coming back from the trip to North Macedonia for the game against Kumanovo 2009, Hapoel thought about taking a 500km trip with bus to Athens and return on a flight with Maccabi Tel Aviv who had just played in the Greek capital. In the last moment however Holon joined forces with boys volleyball team that was on a camp in Croatia and they convinced the Israeli national flight company, who had to return the boys, to make a stop in Sofia and take also the team.

The highlight of the season was when Hapoel almost had to play two games in the same day in two different time frames on April 3rd - against Maccabi Rishon LeZion in the Winner League and against Kumanovo in BIBL.

"We thought of going with the young team with some first squad reinforcements against Kumanovo and two hours later to face Maccabi Rishon with the other players, but we gave up on the idea because it made no sense," added Dvora.

With a win tonight, Hapoel Holon will lift its first trophy since 2018 when the team won the Israeli State Cup. 48 hours later Holon will meet Hapoel Tel Aviv in the local league and they fly to Russia to participate in the BCL Final 8 and play Spanish side Burgos in the 1/4 final.