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Elisha Levy's long and winding road
By Moshe Boker

Maccabi Haifa's return to the Champions League group stage was engineered by head coach Elisha Levy. For Levy, the long and winding road to a place where Avram Grant first took an Israeli team - in his case the 2002 edition of Haifa - started out in Beit She'an.

As a young coach, Levy became a brand name and a symbol of the northern town after leading Hapoel Beit She'an for the first time from the then-third tier 'A' league to the Artzit league, the second highest division in those days. Levy recalls how he told Beit She'an chairman Avi Levy that he had it in him to coach at the highest levels, but that the big clubs would never gamble on a young coach from the outskirts of the country.
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If the owners weren't going to come to him, he would come to the owners, and so he made up his mind to move to the center of the country. There were some bumps on the road, but he never looked back.

Avi Levy yesterday spoke about that meeting in 1993. "Elisha told me he had set himself the goal of being a leading coach in Israeli soccer, and that he would do it from the bottom up," he said. "Beit She'an was a small place where he instigated a major revolution, and he realized he was no big star like Eli Ohana or Avi Nimni, who finished their careers and immediately got to coach big clubs."

Avi Levy stresses that only one thing guides Elisha, and that's the path - hard work and faith in the path.

"Elisha Levy reminds me of Yossi Benayoun," says Avi Levy. "Both came from a development town. Benayoun went from Dimona through Be'er Sheva to Haifa and Europe. Elisha Levy started in Beit She'an and went though other teams to Haifa and the Champions League. Both came from the bottom up without forgetting where they came from, what they were, and they treat VIPs the same as the little guy. That is what makes Elisha, like Benayoun, loved by fans and successful."

Something remarkable about Elisha Levy's path, notes Avi Levy, is that even when he was fired, he rarely took the easy path back to Beit Shean.

He also demonstrated his determination after his 1989-90 debut as a player-coach. Management gave him the ultimatum to either quit playing or quit coaching. He responded with an ultimatum of his own - if I coach, you release the veterans and let me pick my own players. Avi Levy says it was daring for him to ask the owners to let popular players go, but the young coach won out in the end, and it paid off three years later with promotion to the second division.

Levy finally left Beit She'an before the 1995 season and journeyed through an array of clubs over the next decade, including Maccabi Herzliya, Tzafririm Holon, Rishon Letzion and Ashdod S.C. He returned once to Beit She'an in 1998, and returned to the second division (by this time called the National League) for the first time in 2004 when he took over Hapoel Kfar Sava, which he led to promotion in the 2004-05 campaign.

The coach's final ascent to the top began in 2006. Kfar Sava fired him after winning only two out of 19 matches, and he sat at home for the rest of the season. Then Bnei Sakhnin dropped into the second division and hired Levy to get it back into the Premier League. He did so in one season, and in the 2007-08 campaign he led Sakhnin to its best finish ever - fourth place - with a record of 15-10-8.

Avi Luzon, the Israel Football Association chairman, decided to appoint Levy coach of the national under-21 team, but Haifa's Shahar - who had lost Ran Ben Shimon to Maccabi Tel Aviv - scooped him up first. Elisha Levy's path to the top was complete; this week's advancement to the group stage only confirms what he believed way back in Beit She'an.
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