FOR SOME of the Irish journalists present at last night’s Europa League press conference in Tallaght Stadium, the mere fact that Uefa had given tonight’s game the full “Match Press Kit” was enough to drive the point home that Irish football had, at last, arrived at the continental game’s top table. Some of those at yesterday’s top table, however, seemed rather less convinced.
The Brazilian rock band CSS once paraded, rather proudly it must be said, a Scottish flag while playing a concert in Dublin. When Ecuadorian international midfielder Christian Noboa suggested at yesterday’s press conference that the Rubin players, though largely unaware of the specific threat Shamrock Rovers might pose, are wary of their hosts because they know how strong Rangers and Celtic are, there was a suspicion the teaching of European geography in South American schools is not, at least in regard to how it relates to the part of the continent lying to the north of Iberia, quite what it might be.
Noboa, to be fair, was bright, breezy and generally respectful of the Dubliners. However, his manager, 59-year-old Kurban Berdyev, ticked only the last of those boxes and even then when he was pushed to provide any sort of detailed knowledge of Michael O’Neill’s side, he did little to suggest he had spent too many late nights embroiled in detailed research.
But a few late nights of some sort might have gone some way to explaining his demeanour, which might best be described as sleepy.
Berdyev sat buried deep into his chair, face hidden by a slightly outsized baseball cap looking as though he might nod off at any minute.
True, he and his players had only just touched down in Dublin having travelled from Kazan, but it looked as though club officials had somehow managed to spirit their coach off the plane, through immigration and on then off the bus used for the trek around the M50 without rousing him.
Sadly, the training session that was scheduled to follow the press conference meant he was finally going to have to shake himself up a bit.
For what it was worth, Berdyev answered questions, asked mainly by the travelling media, with generalities that seemed roughly to equate to: “We’ll take it one game at a time,” and, “there are no easy games in European football”.
Noboa went further, even if his point did seem to be against his own club on this occasion, when he acknowledged Rubin had little knowledge of Rovers just as Barcelona knew nothing about Rubin when the Russians first went to the Nou Camp a couple of years ago.
His intention, it seemed, was simply to suggest that the Russians can not take anything for granted ahead of tonight’s kick-off and that much, even the briefest of glances of Rovers’ recent run of results in Europe, would suggest, is no more than common sense.
They will, of course, have formed an impression of the scale of the task from the venue for the game.
Back at home, Kazan is throwing up a remarkably impressive array of expensive new sports facilities, in part because the city is soon to host the World Student Games, and Tallaght, well as it looks with its 2,400 temporary seats behind one goal, would seem humble enough by comparison.
“Sure, it is small,” acknowledged the 26-year-old, “but I wouldn’t criticise it for that. Sometimes that can be good for the home fans in games like this.”
Sure enough, the visitors probably would have felt a little more at home had the game been moved to Ibrox or Parkhead.
