Cork City ready for return to the big stage
It looked like Leeside would be without a League of Ireland club for the first time since 1983 following the well-publicised fiasco that brought the club to its knees in February 2010.
However, a new club was born under the ownership of the supporters’ trust FORAS and those fans will deservedly take great pride in all their work when John Caulfield’s side run out tonight to take their place amongst Europe’s elite again.
The club have come a long way in such a short period of time — challenging for the league title last season and again this season, and Caulfield is confident of advancing against the Icelandic side having watched them in action.
“They have three or four very good players; they look a very strong physical team and score a lot of goals from set-pieces. We’ve watched them a lot and they have players that can cause you problems if you don’t defend well. But I’ve seen a few areas where I think we can cause them problems,” said the Cork boss.
“We’ve prepared well and I can see it being very tight but if we can perform at our best, I think we should be good enough to get through.
“I can see it being tight over the two legs and it could go right down to the wire. The onus on us tonight being the home side is to go out and get a positive result, which we are aiming to do. We’re certainly not going to sit back and we want a win to take to Iceland next week.” It’s the first European game at Turner’s Cross since 2008, when City drew 2-2 with FC Haka before going down 4-0 in the second leg in Finland.
Caulfield has experienced many European nights for City as a player, including the famous games against giants Bayern Munich and Galatasaray but this will be his first taste of Europe as a manager and he is relishing the task though he doesn’t expect it to be too dissimilar to what he is used to.
“Our league is after getting a lot more tactical over the last 10 or 15 years. It’s not like it used to be years ago, when it was more of a long ball game. I’ve prepared for this game as I would any other League of Ireland game as they’re all very tactical now and teams prefer to get the ball down and play in a more European style than in the past.”
With Uefa increasing the Europa League prize money by 65% this season and a potential second round tie against Norwegian giants Rosenborg awaiting the winners, Caulfield is looking for the fans to inspire his side to glory tonight against a side that average attendances of 1,500.
“Financially it’s huge for the club to get through to the next round. I appeal to the fans to come out in their numbers and to get behind the team.
“They can have a huge role to play as Reykjavik don’t know this ground and with the fans so close to the pitch, this could rattle them as they may not be used to this type of atmosphere with five or six thousand packed into Turner’s Cross.”
KR are Iceland’s most successful club and last season only went down 1-0 at home to Celtic in their Champions League qualifier before succumbing 4-0 to the Scottish side in the second leg.
They trained at the match venue last night and afterwards manager Bjarni Gudjonsson said he was expecting a tough game. “We know Cork are direct and they like to cross the ball. We had them watched last week and we have watched a few videos so we know what to expect.
“It is also very important for us to progress in Europe for financial reasons and Icelandic clubs who progress in Europe usually do very well domestically also,” said Gudjonsson, who had spells as a player with Stoke City, Plymouth Argyle and Coventry City.
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