UEFA Cup. 1/16 finals. Today (20:00) Lokomotiv is playing against Hapoel on Blumfield stadium, Tel-Aviv.

Lokomotiv left Cyprus for Tel-Aviv on Sunday. Airliner A-300 took off with a 45-minute delay, but ten minutes after the indicator boards switched off the plane started landing. It took about 40 minutes for the whole flight.

At the Ben Gurion airport they were received by the officers of the club Hassan Bidgiev and David Shaginyan, representatives of Hapoel, numerous reporters, who paid much attention to Ruslan Nigmattulin and two afroamericans - Jacobe Lekheto and James Obiore. Juri Semin gave a short interview, during which the reporters tried to make him do some careless remark about the rivals. E.g., one of the interviewers asked: "don't you think that Hapoel is too weak against Real or Roma?" But Semin avoided all the rocks saying that the team that defeated Chelsea requires more respect, and Lokomotiv experiences difficulties while preparing for the match as more than 10 days have passed since the Russian season is over.

Yesterday at 18:30 (local time) Semin held a press conference on the "Blumfield" stadium where he marked good form of central-back Gershon, strikers Osterets and Kleshenko. His answer to the question: "whom would you like to take to Lokimotiv?" was that first of all the player should be willing to leave Israel for Russia. Then Moscow players had a 50-minute training on the pitch.

The match will be sold out: the Israel club press-office said that by the yesterday evening there were only 3000 tickets left and according to the organizers' estimations half of the remaining ones will be sold.