Ironi Kiryat Shmona have shelved plans to give Yair Mordechai a send-off ceremony on Tuesday, deciding the club's former talisman deserves a bigger stage than a Toto Cup opener, ONE reports.
The northern club host Maccabi Haifa - the team Mordechai joined this off-season - in their opening Toto Cup fixture on Tuesday, kicking off at 20:00. A tribute had been mooted for that occasion, but the club now says it will wait.
According to ONE, Kiryat Shmona explained the decision as a matter of respect: with the desire to give Mordechai "full honour," the ceremony will instead be held when the two clubs meet in the league later this season, rather than at Tuesday's preseason cup tie.
It is an unusual scheduling choice, but a telling one - it signals the club sees Mordechai's departure as worthy of a proper league occasion in front of a fuller house, not a curtain-raiser before the campaign has even begun.
Mordechai, 22, is a product of the Kiryat Shmona academy and became one of the more prized young forwards to come through it in recent years, culminating in being voted the club's Player of the Season last term.
He made close to 100 league appearances for Kiryat Shmona and scored 19 goals along the way, according to Ynet, with a standout final campaign of 10 goals and six assists that caught the eye of the country's bigger clubs.
Maccabi Haifa moved for him this off-season, and Mordechai did not hide his excitement on completing the switch. "I'm fulfilling a childhood dream today, signing for a giant club like Maccabi Haifa," he told Ynet at the time.
For Kiryat Shmona, Tuesday's Toto Cup meeting is instead being treated as a straightforward preseason test - their first outing since wrapping up last season - against the very club that has just taken their homegrown star, with the emotional send-off saved for another day.
