Caulfield remains confident ahead of second leg

John Caulfield spoke to Extratime.ie in the aftermath of his sides Europa League first round qualifier in Turners Cross last night where his Cork City side drew 1-1 with KR Reykjavik. Alan Bennett had given Caulfield’s team the lead on 19 minutes but the opposition struck back to equalise through an Oskar Hauksson header on 25 minutes.

Despite how hard the Leesiders tried, they were unable to get another goal that would have put them in the driving seat ahead of next week’s tie and now as a result of their failure in scoring a goal they will now have to score next week if they hope to progress in Europe this season.

“Disappointed for ourselves on the night as I know we didn’t play as good as we can for some reason even though we had lots of experience. We gave away the ball a lot but still at the same time yet we went a goal up and then to concede a goal. We don’t normally concede from set pieces but we knew they were dangerous at corners and it rattled us a bit for 15 minutes. As I said all week it was going to be a tight game.

Many of the Cork City players seemed to struggle with the occasion something Caulfield admitted and he will seek to fix it ahead of the return leg next Thursday.

“It was uncharacteristical of our players to play that bad but we’ll review it over the coming days”

On 80 minutes referee Mads-Kristoffer Kristoffersen decided not to award City a penalty when it appeared to many members of the home support, and City manager John Caulfield, that Mark O’Sullivan had been impeded when jumping for a ball in the box.  

“It looked a blatant penalty to me at this level of football, Mark was going for the ball and it was a push in the back and it was incredible that it wasn’t given.”

On the final whistle there was an altercation between Mark O’Sullivan and Billy Dennehy with many speculating that it was over the Kerry man’s poor free kick at the end that ended up high in the Joe Delaney stand when people were expecting a better delivery.

I wouldn’t worry about that, maybe they should square up to each other more often but it was just a bit of frustration. I have that every second day of my life so I wouldn’t worry too much about it.

As for next week Caulfield knows his team is going to have to go out and get a result in Iceland saying;

“We will have to score, we have an attacking formation for every match but it was disappointing to concede such a soft goal as I said all week I feel both clubs can go and score goals in the away grounds.