In a few short months it will lead to almost two years in Holland at the Ajax academy and the offer of a four-year contract, but he will learn that his love for football will never exceed his love for family and especially for Mirat, his girlfriend, who will become his wife and mother to their daughter, May. He will return home to be with them and, ultimately, to be hailed as the prince of Israeli football, a diamond in La Liga and the Premiership but, in his homeland, forever known as “the Kid ” because of days like this in Be’er Sheva.
Hapoel are top of their league, visitors Maccabi Tel Aviv second and the 15-year-old star of the local team, who stood by the road for four hours before he and his father caught a ride to the stadium, arrives late. Reluctantly, the referee lets Hapoel change their starting line-up and “the Kid” plays, scoring all three goals in a 3-1 win, which secures the title for Hapoel. “Something special,” the newspaper report will say the next day as the story is told of the boy from the small desert town, named Yossi Benayoun.
The 25-year-old West Ham midfielder speaks as he plays, “from the heart”. That Hammers fans have taken Benayoun so easily to theirs after his £2.5m summer move from Racing Santander says much about his range of talent, his magnetism and personality. A magical goal against Fulham three weeks ago encapsulated all his ambition and nerve and desire to thrill. He wants people to feel the excitement he feels whenever he has a ball at his feet.
Physically, he does not seem built to withstand the rigours of English football. “Look at me,” he says. “I don’t have one muscle in my whole body.” But any suggestion of fragility is an illusion, though Benayoun admits he had doubts 20 minutes into his debut against Blackburn. “I couldn’t breathe,” he admits. “I wanted the gaffer to take me off but I was too ashamed to say it. The pace of the game was different to anything I’d ever experienced.”
Teddy Sheringham reassured him. “Even the training took some adjusting to but Teddy told me to take it easy, to build myself slowly and I would get used to the English pace, and he was right,” Benayoun relates. “Teddy’s a great guy to give you confidence. When Yaniv Katan (his fellow Israeli international) arrived here the first thing he said to me was, ‘Yossi, can you believe we’re in the same team as Teddy Sheringham?’ In Israel he is regarded as a special player and he’s an incredible influence at West Ham. We’ve been invited to his house, a few of the players, and we’ve eaten together and talked and you can see the bond that has developed in our play.
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“When I came here (after almost joining Sam Allardyce’s Bolton), everybody said we’d be relegated. Sam Allardyce said, ‘West Ham will not play real football and you won’t get any playing minutes. You’ll not advance. You’re joining the No 1 contenders for relegation’. But I spoke to Eyal Berkovic, my idol, who played for West Ham, and he told me not to even think. He was right, for my heart told me to come here.
“Alan Pardew gave me a good feeling about the club and told me I’d be an important part of the team in a way I believed him. I believe we have the players here, from Anton Ferdinand and Danny Gabbidon to Nigel Reo-Coker and the strikers, to challenge maybe for Europe. We have a manager and players who want to win. We run like crazy for 90 minutes. We go to every game and give everything and that’s why we can beat even a team like Arsenal. Birmingham and teams like this, these are the games we know we need to win.”
Born into a family of Moroccan immigrants, Benayoun has known from a young age what it takes to survive. His parents struggled daily to raise their family in a town renowned for its nuclear facility, high unemployment rate and a pervasive atmosphere of hopelessness. He vowed that whatever he did with his life he would always strive to be exceptional and he would never give up. “It was hard because we had no money, nothing,” he says, “but I never wanted for anything and we never felt we had anything missing. The love we had as a family was enough for everything and always at the middle of the family was me. What little we had they gave to me so that I could play football because they could see I had this talent.”
Ajax’s scouts recognised this, too, and Benayoun moved with his parents, brother, sisters and girlfriend to Holland to fulfil his dream. But homesickness drove each of them back to Israel until finally only young Yossi and his father, Dudu, were left. “Marit missed her family and I told her to go home. I thought we could live apart,” he says. “She was gone only one day when I realised this was not for me. I told the manager I was unhappy in my heart and that evening I was on a plane back to Israel. I was in love, what can I say?” The Israeli press characterised “the Kid” as too soft. He returned to Hapoel Be’er Sheva’s first team and was their top scorer with 15 goals, but the club’s survival in the top division came down to two matches on the final day. In the final minute a penalty for Hapoel gave them a glorious opportunity to beat Maccabi Haifa, but only 17-year-old Benayoun was brave enough to take it. With tears streaming down his face, he stepped up. The goalkeeper saved but Benayoun followed up to score from the rebound. Then the news arrived that a late goal in the other game meant they would be relegated anyway. For an entire nation, Benayoun’s tears and the courage he demonstrated became an enduring image.
He transferred to Maccabi Haifa and twice won the championship and Israeli player of the year awards before returning to Europe. He was Racing Santander’s leading scorer in 2004-05 before his move to Upton Park. “The day I left Ajax I never doubted I would return to Europe and establish myself,” he asserts. “When I didn’t give up during all those years I had to wait for a car to stop and take me to training and to games in Be’er Sheva, I wasn’t going to give up when I had to return to Israel.”
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Whatever path Pardew maps out for West Ham, it is the road from Dimona that will always show Benayoun the way.