It would be easy to get carried away with the significance of Sunday's defeat by Shamrock Rovers of Poland's Odra Wodzislaw. Beating their opponents home and away is a decent achievement and we don't get too many of them to crow about even if the Odra players were suffering from the same close-season Irish league sides have been afflicted by down the years, writes Emmet Malone.

What appeared to be of more genuine importance, however, was the approach adopted by Liam Buckley, his players and the club itself to the games, both of which presented formidable challenges.

Rovers' directors, understandably somewhat preoccupied with the task of completing the financing required for the Tallaght stadium, were delighted with the win at the weekend but what was talked about most afterwards was the manner in which victory had been achieved.

Ostensibly the better side, Odra had been outwitted as well as outplayed. Buckley had tailored the team's tactics to the task facing them and the players implemented his plan almost flawlessly. Their well-earned reward is a trip to the Czech Republic on Friday.

It all sounds like rather basic stuff but in reality clubs here have regularly failed to do themselves justice in European competitions due to indifference to the opposition, apparent inability to obtain decent intelligence on them in advance of games or more general disorganisation.

Fairly typical of the first failing was the view Champions League qualifying games were almost little more than a reward for players' efforts in the previous season's league. So many managers have been guilty of this sort of attitude down the years it seems pointless to single out individuals.

When one manager was asked what he knew about his team's opponents, I recall particularly well from a few seasons back, he said he was more concerned with how his own players performed than with anything to do with the other side. This response was regularly trotted out by managers who had little or no idea of what to expect from opponents.

Managers can, of course, get carried away with playing to the strengths and weaknesses of opponents but to approach a European game with little idea of what to expect is asking for trouble and that particular manager's side lost both of their games against opponents who were regarded as beatable at the time.

Buckley himself has first-hand experience of the difficulty of obtaining reliable information on teams from many of Europe's less prominent leagues. When attempting to prepare St Patrick's Athletic for their games against Zimbru Chisinau in 1999, he recalls, pretty much all he had to go on was a couple of poor-quality videos and third-party accounts, at least one of them from a journalist, that suggested the Moldovans were of "Leinster League standard".

"Personally I've never seen a Leinster League side play quite like that," Buckley laughs as he recalls what remains a fairly painful memory for him.

Only a few days before the game somebody suggested to Buckley that he contact the then Northern Ireland manager, Lawrie McMenemy, for further information on some of Zimbru's individual players as several were internationals and had played in competitive games against Northern Ireland.

McMenemy in turn directed Buckley to his assistant, Joe Jordan, who had done more research on the Moldovans, and it was only when the former Scottish international started describing the club's players, one after the other, in the most glowing of terms, that the Dubliner realised he had a problem on his hands.

Buckley makes the point that not only was the general fitness of his panel an issue because of the timing of the domestic season then but he was also without Keith Doyle, who had not agreed a new contract with the club, and Packie Lynch, who had only returned to training a week or so before the match, while Paul Osam had not fully recovered from a knee problem. "That was pretty much a third of my team," Buckley sighs.

In other years major close-season upheavals amongst the playing staff at a club meant key players who had helped to attain a place in a European competition were gone and new combinations were playing together.

However, in most cases the overall strength of the group should have been roughly the same or, in some cases, even better by the time the European games came around. On occasion, though, there was the sort of situation faced by Dundalk last year when a huge part of the FAI Cup-winning team had moved on after the club had been relegated.

What the performance by Rovers on Sunday suggests is that with the correct approach, and the advantage over many opponents of being in the middle of the league campaign, Irish clubs can maximise their potential rather than, as has so often been the case in the past, fail even to come close to fulfilling it.

Some of the factors that have hampered their progress in the past will continue to dog them and Buckley's only videos of this week's opponents, Liberec, in action may be year-old tapes supplied by one of the club's big victims from last season, Ipswich Town.

The Czech club's record suggests they should too prove strong for Rovers.

But if the Dubliners go into the tie with the same discipline displayed in their first-round games and still lose to a better side there would be no shame attached to the defeat. What is encouraging is that the occasions on which the league's representatives have more or less lost the tie before even setting out for the first leg are becoming less commonplace and our clubs must start performing with sufficient consistency in European competition to find what is the league's true level in UEFA's ranking list.

Only then will we truly see whether they can punch above their weight in the way they will have to if they are to achieve their aim of using European football to generate both revenue and a wider respect for the domestic game.