The World Cup qualifier at home to Germany in October could give a good indication of how Northern Ireland might line up against a leading nation without Bradley.<\/p>\n
After a starring role in the win over Slovakia in the previous match, he picked up a yellow card which ruled him out of the Germany game through suspension. <\/p>\n
On that occasion, it was Spencer who was tasked with filling in at right-back as Hume retained his spot in the centre of a back three. <\/p>\n
The step up in opposition definitely played a role too, but Northern Ireland were certainly less dynamic than against Slovakia, as they missed the drive Bradley offers going forward. <\/p>\n
Digging into the numbers, Spencer stacked up well against the Liverpool man. Bradley won four fouls against Slovakia, while Spencer won two against Germany. <\/p>\n
Those stats are flipped for fouls conceded, and Spencer made 24 passes with a 67.7% success rate, while Bradley had 52.9% success rate from 39 attempts against the Slovaks. <\/p>\n
In the BBC Sport player rater, where BBC Sport readers can have their say on the game, Bradley was top at 8.90 against Slovakia, while Spencer was at 6.68 against Germany – when Ballard was the highest with 7.79.<\/p>\n
Albeit away from home, Northern Ireland will be hoping for a similar level of performance to the Germany game – just with a different result.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The World Cup qualifier at home to Germany in October could give a good indication of how Northern…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":690078,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5011],"tags":[1144,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-690341","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-northern-ireland","8":"tag-northern-ireland","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115880334660076288","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690341","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=690341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690341\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/690078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=690341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=690341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=690341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}