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11th Nov 2017

Denmark manager Age Hareide admits to knowing Ireland’s game plan for tonight inside out

Good news: He doesn't know how to beat it.

JOE

Ireland

He’d settle for a scoreless draw tonight too…

We bet he would settle for a nil-all but Denmark manager Age Hareide will be only fooling himself if he thinks that the Boys In Green will be content with kicking off tonight in Copenhagen with the mindset that a scoreless draw would do the job.

Sure, it would be better than a loss but every Irish person would be a lot happier if the final whistle went, we were still in contention and we had at least one away goal in the back pocket to take back to Dublin with us.

Worryingly, Hareide admitted to journalists on Friday at the press conference that he had Ireland’s tactics all figured out going into the first play-off game but fortunately for us, he still hasn’t figured out how his Danish team can go about beating them.

“The Irish teams that I have played against have very good spirit. They like to play together, to be together. I only have good memories. The [current] game plan is easy to read.

“They don’t change a lot from game to game. You can see the same style of play. But we also see that they stick together, the way the team spirit is spread out through the team the way they work well together.”

Hareide will be reminding his players about the importance of keeping a clean-sheet tonight on their home turf because he knows just how nervous the Irish will be in the second leg with no away goal to fall back on.

“As long as they don’t score goals. A zero-zero would be okay; then we would have 120 minutes in Dublin to score a goal. That increases the possibility to get the away goal with the extra 30 minutes.”

Hopefully, we won’t need extra time to sort this one out, we don’t know if our hearts could take it. Plus, we all know what happened the last time we had extra time in a play-off game…