Brad Lyons: We want to keep European journey going

Brad Lyons insists he’s desperate to see Kilmarnock’s European journey continue.

Despite the Ayrshire side being heavy outsiders against Copenhagen, the Northern Irish midfielder has his eyes firmly on the prize of league phase football.

He said:

“We don’t want the journey to end, we are loving every moment of it but we’re taking it seriously. 

“We’ve done our homework on Copenhagen, we know they’re a good team, but we’re going to back ourselves, we don’t want this to stop, we want to play as many European games as we can this season. 

“We’ve got to embrace this, the reason you play football is to play in front of as many fans as you can. 

“Playing against the Old Firm does give us the experience of this kind of atmosphere, we are going to embrace everything around this situation, the environment, and see what we can do on the pitch.

“They’ve had good results against Manchester United and Bayern Munich in the last year, they got into the last 16 of the Champions League… we’re not denying how good they are. 

They’re quality, but we’ve got a game plan and we’ve worked hard on the training pitch to hopefully implement that on the night.”

Lyons, who has been with Killie since starting their bid to win the Scottish Championship, continued:

“I’ve been here since the start of the Championship, things didn’t work out for Tommy Wright but we replaced him with a great manager and it has been a great climb from there to Europe. 

“I couldn’t have imagined at that point in time getting to Europe… honestly we were just happy to win a game at that point! 

“That’s what I’d call real pressure to be honest, when a club needs to win every game. 

“It was tough at the time, fans have always backed us from then, travelled in their numbers so thankfully we worked our way up. 

“No disrespect to teams in the Championship, but going to some of those stadiums in the winter especially, getting changed in freezing cold portacabins, now we’re playing at a stadium like this with 38,000 capacity. 

“We will appreciate this a lot more after going through those troubled times.”

Lyons has thanked the fans for their support throughout the European qualifiers, especially those making three trips across Europe this month.

He said:

“It has been absolutely incredible the way fans have backed us, they’re spending their hard-earned money travelling across Europe, hopefully we can do the job for them to repay them. 

“The amount of time and money they give us, even back home in the community, buying strips and stuff, it’s incredible. 

“At least they’re getting some nice trips out of it… we drove through the city and it’s incredible. 

“Hopefully the fans can stay half responsible and enjoy it as well!

“It’s probably the three most expensive places in Europe for them unfortunately, thankfully we didn’t have to pay for our own plane tickets! 

“I don’t think we could have picked three better places, they’re all incredible places.”