Paul Fennessy reports from the Ghelamco Arena

SHAMROCK ROVERS boss Stephen Bradley refused to blame Dan Cleary after the defender’s costly defensive slip amid a 3-0 defeat to Gent in the Europa Conference League group stages on Thursday night.

The Hoops were already under the cosh finding themselves 1-0 down and Cleary’s mishap resulted in Vadis Odjidja-Ofoe expertly volleying home after the centre-back almost atoned for his error with a last-ditch block on Hugo Cuypers’ goalbound effort.

Thus, a difficult task became almost impossible, as the Irish side trailed 2-0 after just 18 minutes.

Bradley, however, suggested such mistakes were largely down to the style Rovers choose to play rather than the individual being primarily responsible.

“The second goal is something that is on me. I ask the players to play that way in every game, so I take responsibility for that.,” he told reporters.

“Dan is one of the best passing centre-halves we have, he is probably the best in the country at it. It is very, very rare that you see a mistake like that, unfortunately, he slipped and at this level, you don’t get away with that but, as I said, that is on me.

“I ask the players to play that way and be brave. We need to give him more options off the ball. We didn’t.

“He slipped, and we got punished.

“The difference in the game is when you give up chances to teams like that they usually take them at vital moments.”

And despite the disappointing result, with just two games played, Bradley was refusing to get too downhearted about his side’s overall chances of progression.

 ”We are very much in the group. Look, we were never going to win every game in this group. We are going to win some, lose some, draw some, that was always going to be the way this group went. We knew that before the group started.

“We lost tonight, we will do it again, we understand what went wrong and what went right and we will be better for it moving forward.

“Parts of the performance were good, parts were not, and if you don’t start well in these games you are going to get punished. You can’t give teams like that a leg up in the first 10, 15 minutes.

“We knew before we kicked a ball we were going to win, lose and draw.”

“We will take this and move on.

“You don’t forget you have to learn and understand why it has happened but this group has been brilliant the last three, four years putting games to bed very quickly, win, lose or draw. It is not their job to dwell on results, the staff have a responsibility to review the game and move on to the next one. We will do that again.”

Hoops defender Andy Lyons expressed similar sentiments to his manager. 

“It was obviously difficult with the result. We knew they were a good side. We had a number of chances, I’m not saying we should have won the game but I think obviously we’ve made mistakes and they’ve capitalised on that and took their chances. But that’s what we expected.

“You get one, you never know what might happen. We move on from this and have a big game Sunday [the FAI Cup quarter-final against Derry]. So we’ll concentrate on that now.”