Aaron Hughes certainly hasn’t thrown in the towel when it comes to reaching the knockout stages of the Europa League. Fulham’s defeat in Rome has left them needing to win their last two games – at home to CSKA Sofia and in Basel – to be sure of qualifying and the stand-in skipper says the team will be giving it their best shot.
All we can do is win our next two games. In Italy, we played really well in the first-half but the sending off at the start of the second-half really changed the game. We’ve just got to keep playing our football and keep the momentum going. We’re playing well at the moment and maybe a couple of the results we’ve had recently haven’t reflected that – but as long as we keep putting in good performances, the results will come.
The Europa League is something different – there’s a bit of excitement about it. You don’t get to play in Europe every season and we worked so hard to get there last season. We went to Lithuania and to the other side of Russia in qualifying so that’s a long way to go just to give up on it half way through.
We’ll go into these next two games and do everything we can to get the results. I think you get a few Champions League teams dropping into the competition for the knockout stages so you could get another couple of big teams and a nice trip somewhere.
As the Manager has said, our priority is the Premier League but doing as well as we can in the Europa League is good for everybody.
We’re not getting ahead of ourselves. A lot of teams have spent a lot of money and have improved this year. Every year it gets even more difficult, we probably over-achieved a bit last year. To do it again this year will be even harder but that’s not to say we wouldn’t like to do it but we know, at the end of the day, our priority is staying in the League and anything else is a bonus.
