Stephen Bradley: 'You can’t give them the goals we gave them'

Shamrock Rovers manager Stephen Bradley acknowledged the gulf in levels between his side and Chelsea, but remained frustrated with some aspects of the performance after his side’s 5-1 defeat in the Conference League on Thursday.

Defensive errors cost the Tallaght side dearly in the first half at Stamford Bridge as the Blues’ first two goals were served up to Marc Guiu on a silver platter either side of Markus Poom’s equaliser.

“You can accept moments of quality that hurt you, that’s quite normal against this level of opposition, but you can’t give them the goals we gave them,” Bradley said.

“You have to learn from these experiences, these are experienced players, they’ve played 50 games together in Europe. They’ve played good teams and the errors we made are very unlike us.”

Chelsea are fighting week in and week out near the summit of the Premier League while Rovers have only played four competitive matches in Europe since the beginning of November, something which Bradley was keenly aware of when reflecting on some of his side’s missteps while still recognizing the pedigree of their opposition.

“You could see that we haven’t been playing competitive games regularly, you lose that match sharpness, you lose seeing the little balls around the corner and the penetrative passes, those bits that you only get when you’re playing on a regular basis.”

“As a club and a team we’re not basing our standards against Chelsea that’s for sure,” he added.

When asked about Chelsea’s chances of going on to win the tournament the Rovers’ boss indicated that he agrees with the general consensus of the Blues’ strong favorites tag.

“They can win it if they want to, it depends on where they are in the Premier League and how the injuries and squad are. I think if they were in the Champions League they could come close to winning that.”

Despite the disappointing result, Rovers’ campaign so far has exceeded all expectations and is comfortably the best run of results an Irish team has had in UEFA competition.

Bradley’s men can now look ahead to knockout football as he was quick to highlight his side’s success, finishing the league phase on 11 points.

“It’s the record for a team from Ireland, considering that our league season’s been over for more than a month, the players have done extremely well. The aim was always to come here with the points in the bag and qualified,” he concluded.

Shamrock Rovers are now set to face Molde of Norway in the play-off round