Barry Robson spoke to the media on Wednesday lunchtime to preview tomorrow night’s Europa League Play-off tie with BK Häcken at Pittodrie. RedTV subscribers can watch in full through the video above.
“The boys are excited and are desperate to get going. In training today they were desperate to get going, we worked on a lot of tactical stuff and we’ve just got them fed and away to rest up. So we’re really looking forward to the game.
“What the group of players and staff have achieved is they’ve achieved group stage football in Europe. So first and foremost, I said to them ‘you’ve done that, well done.’ It’s the first time since Jimmy Calderwood all of those years ago, and obviously I think it was Sir Alex before that.
“It’s a huge thing that they’ve done, but now the message to them is what an opportunity you’ve got, what a real opportunity you’ve got to take this club into the Europa League, which would be huge. They understand that, they know that and they’ve worked so hard to get to the Conference League, now they’ve got a chance to go to the Europa League and it will be a great achievement for the players if they did. I wouldn’t say that there’s any more pressure on them. I just think there’s more excitement in them to go and try and perform well against a full house at Pittodrie.
“Of course there is a lot of work still to do but I actually thought we were good in the first-half last week. I think people need to realise that when you watch Häcken, they have got players that are moving for millions. They are a real good side. They’re Swedish champions. I think people maybe thought it wouldn’t have been as hard as what it was. We knew that they’ve got real quality. There is talk of (Ibrahim) Sadiq going for a few million. They’ve got really good quality in the team and I actually thought we did well in the first-half. It was just really good players that opened us up. Sometimes in football, no matter how well you defend if you have real quality like that, then they can score goals. What we did do is we showed that we could score goals as well.
“It’s a difficult game for us, we know that. We need to be at our best to win the game. We know that and we know it’s going to be difficult. There’ll be times when we won’t have the ball, we get that, and there will be times when we’ll try and go after them. The game will be difficult for both teams. I think when you saw the last game, you saw two teams really at it. It was a brilliant game of football. Then when you see that energy and what the two teams put into it, and with their result on the Sunday and then we had to play, they lost four goals and what we managed to do was hang in and stay in the fight and we come away with a point with a poor performance. It shows you what the two teams can give and hopefully both teams will need to go and give that again tomorrow and see where it takes us.”
“We are just as we are. We’ve not got any injuries. We just took big Pape in and obviously he cant play but we’ve got a clean bill of health at the moment.”
