Doherty: "It's a competition we desperately want to be in"

Matt Doherty knows it’s about “getting the job done” as we look to see off Maccabi Haifa tonight and clear the final qualifying hurdle in this season’s Europa League.

Having negotiated our way past tricky away ties against Lokomotiv Plovdiv in Bulgaria and KF Shkendija in North Macedonia over the last fortnight, we return to Tottenham Hotspur Stadium to take on the Israeli side in the play-off round (kick-off 8pm UK).

The winners of the single-leg tie will advance to the group stage of the competition, which has, of course, always been our target.

Speaking at our official pre-match press conference on Wednesday, right-back Matt underlined how the squad is doing everything possible to ensure we progress.

“The competition is difficult,” he said. “It’s the travelling as well, because you find yourself travelling to places that are quite far away. You play games all the time so it’s not necessarily the games that are an issue. It’s a competition that we desperately want to be in.

“We’ve done the job in the previous two games, I know we probably didn’t have our best stuff or play particularly well but we managed to get job done. That’s kind of the goal – get the job done, then hopefully once the group stages come along, we can start to look at our performances and try to string some good performances together.”

Matt made it to the quarter-finals of the Europa League last season with Wolves, eventually losing out to a late goal against Sergio Reguilon’s Sevilla as the competition reverted to a tournament format in Germany in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Does the Republic of Ireland international believe we can be among the contenders to lift the trophy this year?

“For sure,” he replied. “When you get to the group stage, even when teams fall out from the Champions League – whoever they are, even if they’re big clubs – I think we’re still good enough to be able to progress all the way in this tournament. If you look at our squad now, it’s quite exciting and we’ll be hard to stop.”