O’Neill was left to lament some soft defending as a defensive mix-up allowed Amiri to pounce for Germany’s second, whilst he also questioned the awarding of the free-kick which Wirtz superbly dispatched.<\/p>\n
“For 60 or 65 minutes we were well in the game. The second goal is a bit of a freak goal, we could have defended it better. The third goal isn’t a free-kick. It’s a fantastic finish but it’s a soft free-kick,” he explained.<\/p>\n
“I thought the referee was a bit fussy in the second half. He refereed it well in the first.<\/p>\n
“We were well in the game and needed to get to that final 15 minutes and we might have had a final chance, but the game drifted away from us.”<\/p>\n
Northern Ireland sit second in Group A following a win and a defeat from their opening two games.<\/p>\n
O’Neill believes his side are where they expected to be at this stage of qualifying, with two huge home games against Slovakia and Germany to come in October.<\/p>\n
“It’s tough to play two games away from home,” he said. “We got what we hoped for, but we’re a bit disappointed it’s not a little bit more.<\/p>\n
“We have to be ready to play back-to-back at home and we know two good results will put us in a good position.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"O’Neill was left to lament some soft defending as a defensive mix-up allowed Amiri to pounce for Germany’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":406579,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5310],"tags":[2000,299,1824],"class_list":{"0":"post-406578","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-germany"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=406578"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406578\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/406579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=406578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=406578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=406578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}