THE OPPORTUNITY to take on Celtic at the Aviva Stadium in the next round of the Champions League Qualifiers won’t stop St Patrick’s Athletic from focusing on the job at hand tonight when they face Legia Warsaw.
That’s according to Pat’s boss Liam Buckley, who said, although it would be fantastic to play the Scottish Champions at the home of Irish football, they could be out of the competition by 10pm this evening.
He said: “We’ve spoken about the possibility of playing them, and we know it’s there. We’re all aware that Glasgow Celtic in Dublin, potentially in the Aviva, would be fantastic for St Patrick’s Athletic in a competitive Champions League game, it doesn’t get any better than that”.
“That said, we could be out of the tournament by 10pm, so we’ve got to make sure that our focus and our full concentration is about applying ourselves, having a game plan, sticking to it, and giving ourselves a chance of getting through the tie.”
Having taken the lead last week in Poland through Christy Fagan, the Saints were pegged back in injury-time when Miroslav Radović hit the back of the net for the Polish champions. Killian Brennan should be fit for tonight’s tie having trained yesterday, and the Saints’ boss is hoping his team can replicate their title-winning form of last season, with the need to keep their defence tight, the first priority.
“We don’t have to go chasing them tomorrow night” he explained. “At the minute they have to score obviously to go through here so I think the onus will be on them.
“They will have a game plan to break us down, and from our end, we want to be compact with a little bit of a balance of both.
“Our league form last year winning the league, we had the most goals scored the day we won the league, and least amount of goals scored against us, so it’s that sort of mentality we need tomorrow night.”
