No luck for Northern Irish in European Championship debut

Kyle Lafferty felt Northern Ireland “didn’t turn up” after suffering a 1-0 defeat against Poland in their Euro 2016 debut on Sunday.

“It’s been a massive achievement”, O’Neill said at the 34,500-seater Stadium Nice.

Michael O’Neill’s team were excellent at staying compact and forcing the ball into wider areas but, as I said to Gary Lineker at half-time, the 10-15 minutes after the interval were vital.

“We embrace the whole situation not fear it”, O’Neill said.

“I think we were overawed”, Lafferty told BBC Sport.

Key Opta stats: – Northern Ireland have failed to win their last six matches at major tournaments (D2 L4).

The huge expectations back home, however, will put Poland under considerable pressure as they attempt to pass the group stage at the Euros for the first time, and Northern Ireland are just the team to play on their anxiety. But they don’t have a star on Lewandowski’s level, and their defenders don’t match up with him well either. You can only go for it if you have the ball. “He’s like Sweden’s Ibrahimovic, a huge player and a big personality, a talisman”.

He was involved in half of his country’s goals in qualifying for this tournament, scoring seven and assisting one of them.

“We’ll do the maths on that”, he laughed, a clue that O’Neill is impressed but undaunted by the Poles.

“It’s unusual to say but we lacked belief; it felt like that at times”.

Northern Ireland is a relative newcomer to the tournament, but they won their qualifying group, and they have an internet sensation in Will Grigg.

And although only a handful of O’Neill’s squad play in England’s Premier League, he has moulded a tough unyielding outfit that is unsafe from set-pieces. Poland will face an exponentially sterner test when they go up against Germany in Saint-Denis.

“But we have three centre-halves [in the squad] that play in the Premier League, they play against top centre forwards every week – [Olivier] Giroud, [Diego] Costa – which is in our favour”.

Yes, we have lost our first match but one win could get us to the last 16 and, with Germany to play in our final group game, the best chance of us getting that will be against Ukraine.

“It is nice to hear those words from such a great player, but if we want a good result tomorrow we all need to be generals starting from the goalkeeper through to the strikers”, Krychowiak said.