Michael O’Neill: Northern Ireland feeling positive ahead of World Cup qualifiers

Michael O’Neill believes Northern Ireland should look to the World Cup qualifying campaign with optimism after their final friendly warm-up ended in a 1-0 win over Iceland, despite a red card for Brodie Spencer.

Isaac Price fired O’Neill’s side in front after 36 minutes and later made a key goal-line clearance as Northern Ireland won a match in which they finished with 10 men for the first time since the famous victory over Spain in 1982.

It was perhaps not the match O’Neill had envisaged going into the night as Northern Ireland spent the vast majority of the final half-an-hour defending following Spencer’s dismissal, but the win felt more significant given it came in the face of adversity.

O’Neill will take the positives from that as he turns attention to September’s qualifiers away to Luxembourg and Germany.

“We approach it in a good place and we approach it with optimism,” O’Neill said of the qualifying campaign. “I think there’s a belief in there that, yes, we will be able to go and take points at this level. We look forward to it.”

O’Neill’s squad remains both young and in large parts inexperienced. Twelve of the 25-man squad for Tuesday’s game were 21 or under, and more than half remain in single figures for the number of caps they have.

Having been drawn alongside Germany, Slovakia and Luxembourg in Group A, Northern Ireland’s realistic target is second place and a play-off spot, but O’Neill’s optimism extends well beyond the next six games.

“I know the team will continue to progress beyond the World Cup campaign,” he said. “It’s just natural that the team will continue to progress. The more they play international football, the better they’ll get at it.

“That’s all they need – they need more and more exposure, they need more minutes under their belts. Will the world Cup campaign come too soon for this group? I don’t know. The proof will be in the games.”

As had been expected ahead of the fixture, Saturday’s 2-1 defeat to Denmark in Copenhagen showed where Northern Ireland need to improve out of possession. Spencer’s red card turned Tuesday’s friendly into a similar exercise for much of the second half.

When asked what his main takeaways from the week were, O’Neill said: “I think we’re going to go into games where we’re going to come under a lot of pressure, teams that will come and press us.

“We have to be better than what we’ve shown in both Copenhagen and then here in terms of how we deal with that. But the other side of our team is our ability to play on the counter-attack, our ability to run without the ball, our desire in our shape and structure.

“We’ve a lot of things, when we look at the two games, where we’ll find a lot of positives. But we’re always looking for it to get better. This is still very early in the progression of this team.”