Home form in Europe

[afc_1983]

Another excellent result away from home last night for the Dons. It's clear McInnes has a formula for away games in Europe that works well.

If we have serious ambitions of progressing beyond Limassol, and indeed the round thereafter, we need to do better at home, though - scoring and winning in Cyprus is not beyond us, but it would be nice if we could take a lead over there or at least keep a clean sheet in the home leg.

I feel McInnes hasn't yet found the right balance for the tactics at home. It bears out in the results we've had in Europe at Pittodrie in recent seasons. We cannot keep conceding cheap goals or playing in such an open way. In the end we were fortunate it was 1-1 v Siroki.

I'm not sure what the answer is - whether it's to be more offensive and try to rattle teams, or to play a cagey game and keep it tight. I'm not sure what the team is best suited to doing - I think, though, that we've been caught somewhere in the middle of doing both in previous home games, and it's not worked at all.

As evidenced from our first leg against Siroki, we could really do with having centre backs who are comfortable on the ball and can retain possession a bit better and link the play into the midfield. Hopefully Arnason can give us that composure and bring us up to a level we'll need to be at to win.

[vasilyrats86]

Simple run riot at hame jobs done

Used to be the case you wanted the 1st leg away but we have shown you can still turn around draws at hame in the 1st and win the 2nd (Groningen and Siroki)

Worth noting Shkendija and Fola are also in the 3rd round two sides we just got past in recent years but they've proved they were no pushovers by knocking out some supposedly better sides from the likes of Serbia,Finland and Azerbaijam

[sheepcrooky]

It's a two legged affair, and as long as you don't completely **** up the first game at home, you are always in it. Yes, clean sheet and a couple of goals at home would be perfect, but 1-1 is not a complete disaster neither.

I'm sure I heard somewhere on Friday that Siroki was McInnes's 5th away victory for AFC in Europe and Sir Alex only ever managed 4 away wins in his tenure of AFC.