Stephen Kenny will put Dundalk on front foot in St Petersburg

The trip took five hours longer than expected due a problem with the plane and the city feels colder than it should; Baltic, you might say and you would be right, but Stephen Kenny says he would be more concerned if it was hot in St Petersburg. You could not buy positivity like that.

For Kenny, on nights like tonight, it is an essential part of the armoury with his side clearly up against it, although the Dubliner sounded exasperated as he spoke about a suggestion that he might write this one off as a lost cause in order to focus on the less daunting challenges ahead.

“I just couldn’t do that,” he said. “I just couldn’t. You just you can’t go into the match admitting defeat to any team. You just can’t do that and I won’t entertain that thinking either. We’ve got to try and get ready and get a result.”

Complaints

Doing it will not be easy, of course. Dundalk did well in the first leg but still had few complaints afterwards about losing. Quite how they are supposed to do better this time seems like something Kenny himself has been grappling with. The Irish found themselves defending too deep for long spells but had, he says, no option. The one positive, he insists, being that it played to at least one of the Oriel Park outfit's big strengths.

"We would ideally like to have more possession than we had in Tallaght but it's bloody hard to get a hold of it," he said. "They force you back; we didn't deliberately sit off. They dominate you, their coach obviously has a way of playing where they think, 'we are superior, let's dominate and show our superiority'.

“They play with three narrow forwards and two full backs who are really like forwards. It’s nearly like going back to play a team in the Fifties with five forwards. The two wingers are like inside forwards. And the two full backs play as wingers. It’s like that 2-3-5 thing, not a million miles away from that.

“So your winger has a choice: let their full back go and then counter or else go with him. Your natural instinct is, of course, is to go with him or you will be punished. So they do force you back and they do dominate possession.

“But we are a brilliant counter-attacking team,” he continued. “There is nobody in our group better at counter-attacking than us. I think we are exceptional.

“We showed that in Alkmaar, we showed it against Maccabi and we should have scored [more] against Zenit. So I don’t think that we should be fearful of not scoring but we must try to get more of a hold of the ball and try to get a foothold on possession.”

Robbie Benson is set to miss out with a hamstring injury, while Darren Meenan did not travel due to a family bereavement. Stephen O'Donnell is back, though, and if he is to start then Kenny must decide whether to drop Chris Shields or shift Ronan Finn more forward. Pat McEleney could also move inside to replace Benson, with John Mountney starting on the wing.

Hamstring problem

“It’ll be totally up to the manager and I’ll go with whatever he decides,” says O’Donnell who returned at the weekend after a couple of weeks out due to a hamstring problem. Given that injury, it might, he admits, be a case of “either, or” with regard to this game and Sunday’s cup final but he is careful to avoid any suggestion on his part that he would not be capable of not playing a part in both.