Dundalk
will have to fly in the face of recent European football history if they are to become the first Irish side to make it to the
Champions League
group stages.
No League of Ireland side in either of Uefa’s club competitions have overturned a two-goal deficit since Dundalk themselves went close in July 2014.
On Wednesday evening, after the 2-0 defeat to Legia Warsaw at the Aviva Stadium, manager Stephen Kenny was quick to cite the experience of that Europa League tie against Hajduk Split when the Irish side, having lost 2-0 at Oriel Park, headed away the following week and came within a whisker of completing a dramatic fightback.
“We have an absolutely huge mountain to climb at 2-0 down,” he said. “But we lost 2-0 in Oriel to Hajduk and won 2-1 over there. They were really hanging on. We had two great chances to score late on. So we can draw from our experience of that, that we will have opportunities over there. But we are really up against it and we are under no illusions.”
The Hajduk game was all the more remarkable in that the Croatians scored first in their home leg before Dundalk started to get into things and it was the second-half before Kenny’s men scored with Pat Hoban levelling things up on the night after 66 minutes and Kurtis Byrne getting the team’s second 16 minutes from time, after which there were indeed chances for the Irish players to complete what would have been an astonishing comeback.
Gone down
The problem, though, is while there have been precisely 500 two-legged ties in the two main European club competitions since, with 134 of them having involved the away team winning the first leg, only eight of the sides that lost those opening ties at home has came back to qualify and not one has done so after having gone down by two or more goals.
In fact, just two sides have overcome such a setback since the start of the 2011/’12 campaign. The first was that season with Liechtenstein’s Vaduz losing 0-2 to Vojvodina of Serbia in the second qualifying round of the Europa League before progressing in dramatic fashion in the second leg which they won 3-1, giving them the overall edge of away goals, thanks to a goal scored in the sixth minute of injury-time.
The only time that something similar has happened since was in March 2014 when Spanish neighbours Sevilla FC and Real Betis were drawn to play each other in the Round of 16 of the Europa League. Sevilla suffered a surprise 0-2 defeat in the opening game but a week later gained revenge at the Estadio Benito Villamarín when they won by the same score. Extra-time did not produce a winner and so the tie went to penalties with Seville eventually winning 4-3. As it happens, they also went to win the final, again clinching victory in a shootout.
Similar situation
In recent years other Irish clubs have found themselves in a similar situation to Dundalk with Shamrock Rovers, for instance, having lost first legs at home 2-0 to both Odds BK and RoPS of Norway and Finland respectively.
The Dubliners lost one and drew one of the away legs that followed but it is hard to judge from the wider statistics how competitive these return legs generally are as there must be a sense in many cases that the tie is effectively over.
It is pretty common, in any case, for the team that wins the first leg to win the second too, often by a bigger margin with, for instance, five of the six first leg away wins in the knockout stages of Europa League proper in 2014/’15 followed by home wins for the clubs that led going into the second games.
None of which is not hugely surprising given that, even if they had not won the first encounter on the basis that they were clearly the better team, they still had home advantage against a side that now needed to chase things and was therefore obliged at some stage to take chances.
