Woe is me! Athletic were 2-0 up at half time but managed somehow to lose 3-2!! That is poor! Still the home leg to come.
They have nothing on the poorly named Sporting Braga, if you get through and play a Portuguese side you'll see what I mean.
Worse than 0-0, better than losing 1-0. Nothing else to say really. We're not out of it by any means, but nerves are going to be stretched.
I think Villareal are the strongest of the Spanish teams in the EL. God knows why Athletic Bilbao have to qualify as they finished 7th and Celta Vigo 8th. Spain usually has 2 automatic qualifiers.
Hope we play Ward-Prowse against next week, they struggled with his set piece deliveries. And hopefully we work a bit more on defending from those long throws, though in the end we didn't concede from one. Overall I thought the second half performance was really good though we seemed to tire toward the end.
Didn't watch the match, obviously slightly disappointed with the result. It's only the first leg, so plenty of time to set thing right. But I will be genuinely gutted if we don't qualify to group stage.