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Soccer

Stephen Kenny on a difficult season and Dundalk's Rosenborg challenge

Unlike the previous three seasons when Dundalk have gone on to win the SSE Airtricity League titl...



Stephen Kenny on a difficult s...
Soccer

Stephen Kenny on a difficult season and Dundalk's Rosenborg challenge

Unlike the previous three seasons when Dundalk have gone on to win the SSE Airtricity League title, the prospect of making it four in a row is an extremely distant one.

Eighteen points off runaway leaders Cork City, attention will now turn to the Champions League qualifying rounds next month where they have been drawn with Norway's record champions Rosenborg BK, who at one time were regular group stage participants in Europe's elite club competition.  

"When I managed against them with Bohemians, they had been in the group stages of the Champions League eight years in a row and every player in their squad was an international at that time," he told Off The Ball on Tuesday night, before touching on Rosenborg's recent resurgence.

"They've obviously been able to afford the wages of a player like Nicklas Bendtner, who's come in and is high profile. Certainly they have a fine stadium in Trondheim and that's been used to hold Champions League games. So they are formidable opposition but it's also a tough draw for them. They wouldn't have wanted to draw us."

And in terms of Dundalk's long term plans off the back of the revenue generated from last season's long stay in Europe, he explained that the board "want to build a modern facility, ideally at Oriel Park".

Closer to home, Kenny spoke about the frustrations of inconsistency and the knock on effect of last season's European fairytale run.

"We had the European games finishing in mid-December and starting again in January, we had a lot of players who played nearly 60 games last season, so it had a huge effect on the injury list at the start of the season. Apart from losing the players we lost, we were also missing a lot of our players for a lot of the season. But those are excuses really as well," he said.  

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