This match was like a greatest hits album of a Scottish side in the early rounds of European qualifying.<\/p>\n
Largely unheard of opposition who were only formed 10 years ago and had not won a single European tie before last week, on a pitch which cut up so badly players were falling all over the place.<\/p>\n
The only missing factor was sweltering heat, although Hibs played the first half as though it was over 30C given how sluggish they looked.<\/p>\n
Gray predicted his side would face an aggressive, motivated and intense team and his analysis was spot on.<\/p>\n
The problem was his side struggled to cope with it, and when they did dominate possession and territory too often the quality was lacking as pass after pass went astray.<\/p>\n
The few hundred Hibs fans who made the journey were at least treated to the sunshine behind a goal in the bowl-like Fadil Vokrri Stadium.<\/p>\n
They can also take encouragement from the fact Malisheva have lost all three of their away European matches by a total score of 13-1 – Vikingur of Iceland beat them 8-0 a year ago.<\/p>\n
Still, Hibs will need much better next week if they want to continue their quest for the league phase, which looks a daunting task after Malisheva’s late second goal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This match was like a greatest hits album of a Scottish side in the early rounds of European…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":111210,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-564671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=564671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=564671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=564671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=564671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}