Crusaders can win in Macedonia

Posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 5:51 pm and is filed under News.

Stephen Baxter, the manager of Irish Europa League hopefuls the Crusaders, believes that his side have a real chance of progressing to the next round of the tournament when they take on FK Rabotnicki in the away leg of the Europa League qualifier next week.

The Irish team, comprising a motley collection of part-timers, walked away from the home leg of their qualifier on Tuesday with a commendable 1-1 draw, and could easily have taken the match if they had converted a penalty against the Macedonian side.

“We are not celebrating, because we should have won the game,” Baxter told the BBC. “Now we can play them away with a bit of confidence. We will go to try to win the match.”

“We came back and got something from the game and it was no more than we deserved. We should have won 3-1 given the chances we had. We were better than them. When we went down to 10 men, for a 20-minute spell we played them off the park.”

“Everyone gave a magnificent, professional performance. They all worked their socks off. We can take a lot of pride from tonight.”