“Hopefully he gets a warm welcome when he comes to Belfast.”<\/b><\/p>\n
When Julian Nagelsmann finished his post-match interview following Germany’s 3-1 win over Northern Ireland, former defender Stephen Craigan was a little taken aback. <\/p>\n
For 68 minutes, Northern Ireland had matched the European heavyweights in the World Cup qualifier and were level as Isaac Price’s excellent finish from a corner cancelled out Serge Gnabry’s early opener. <\/p>\n
Germany, who were on a run of three straight defeats, eventually won the game through substitute Nadiem Amiri and a superb Florian Wirtz free-kick, but it was hardly a vintage showing from the four-time World Cup winners. <\/p>\n
So, what did Nagelsmann say that irked Craigan and the BBC Sport punditry team in Cologne?<\/p>\n
“It’s not easy to defend a lot of long balls and not easy to defend a lot of second balls, so I’m happy with the result,” Nagelsmann told BBC Sport NI.<\/p>\n
“It’s not that easy when every set piece and ball that’s free on the pitch they play a long ball and attack with 10 players with the second ball. <\/p>\n
“There are always a lot of players in our own red zone. It’s not brilliant to watch, this way of soccer, but it’s effective and it’s not that easy to defend it. <\/p>\n
“I think we had 10 or 12 set-pieces to defend, and we only conceded one goal. It’s really a strength of the Northern Ireland team. It’s not that easy – we have better players but it’s not that easy to defend this way of playing soccer.”<\/p>\n
Germany captain Joshua Kimmich had also described Northern Ireland’s approach as “a special style of playing”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“Hopefully he gets a warm welcome when he comes to Belfast.” When Julian Nagelsmann finished his post-match interview…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":407796,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-407795","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115168688521780407","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407795","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=407795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407795\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/407796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=407795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=407795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=407795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}