IT MIGHT be two defeats in two in this Europa League group campaign, but Shamrock Rovers boss Michael O’Neill saw last night’s spirited performance at White Hart Lane as another stepping stone to bigger things in the months ahead, and even Harry Redknapp predicted that the Dubliners will “get a result somewhere” between now and mid-December when this grand adventure is due to wrap up.
This was not to be their night but, having soaked up relentless pressure both before and after the 16-minute second-half spell that yielded all of the game’s goals and briefly led their celebrated opponents, the visitors emerged with considerable pride from what was always going to be one of their toughest tests.
“They were a credit to the League of Ireland,” said O’Neill afterwards. “But the reality is that I’d have preferred it to stay at 0-0 until the 89th minute because if we did score I knew we were going to get a reaction from them.
“I thought we played well after the goal but the reality is that when you look at what they had on their bench, the various players they were in a position to throw at us, we were always going to find it difficult to hang on
“We’d still be disappointed with the goals if I’m honest but the lad (Andros) Townsend was electric from the time he came on and even shifting Billy (Dennehy) didn’t really counter the threat he posed in the way that we would have hoped.
“Overall, though, I thought we did well without the ball in the first half and worked hard to stay in it late on so the players, I’m very proud to say, did themselves justice out there tonight. What we saw at the end, though, was a team that’s coming to the end of their season against a team that’s just starting theirs. The reality is that we would need to be as fresh as possible going into a challenge like that.”
Perhaps the rest they will get when their title defence is out of the way might allow them to test the Londoners more severely when they come to Ireland two weeks before Christmas.
In the meantime O’Neill had only praise for his players, particularly goalscorer Stephen Rice and of course the fans who had travelled in such huge numbers for the game.
“It was fantastic support,” he said. “I suppose it’s the first time that a League of Ireland team has had the opportunity to play at this stage of any of the European competition and it’s great to have that level of support. I think it added to the occasion too. It was good for them at the end as well, it was end-to-end stuff . . . even if it was at one end slightly more than it was at the other one.”
Spurs, he added, are clearly among the favourites to win this competition if, that is, they actually want to. “Harry Redknapp has to prioritise competitions in the same way that I or any other manager has to, but when you look at what he’s got you’d have to say that they are one of the top two or three teams in the competition and they must have a very good chance of winning it.”
Redknapp, meanwhile, was relieved: “When we went one down obviously you’re concerned,” he said, “because you think that maybe it’s going to be one of those nights but when we’d come in at half-time, to be fair, we could have been three up because we had hit the woodwork, their ’keeper was making saves and we were creating chances. To be honest, though, I thought we played well, we got at them, the tempo of it all was generally pretty good and in the end we took a few of our chances.”
