Ballard’s latest injury continues a luckless run for one of Northern Ireland’s key figures.<\/p>\n
Since the start of 2024 Nations League, Northern Ireland have played 21 internationals but the former Arsenal man has featured in just 10. It has been a similar story with Liverpool’s Conor Bradley, currently sidelined after January knee surgery, who has won 13 caps during the same period.<\/p>\n
“We’ve not had enough of him [Ballard], that’s nobody’s fault, it’s just the nature of football and the unfortunate nature of being injured in football,” said O’Neill.<\/p>\n
“When Conor got injured, we knew that Conor was going to be out for a long period of time. With Daniel, he’s not had an injury of that significance but he has had injuries that have coincided with quite a lot of international football, so he’s been very unlucky with that side of things.<\/p>\n
“It’s more disappointment for the player because I know how badly he wants to come and play and how badly he wants to play for his club.”<\/p>\n
With O’Neill’s favoured system involving a back-three, in Georgia it was Blackburn’s Tom Atcheson and Oxford United’s Ciaron Brown who started alongside Ballard.<\/p>\n
Hull City’s Paddy McNair is one of the squad’s most experienced players, while Norwich’s Ruairi McConville has also featured regularly in recent windows.<\/p>\n
In his first stint as Northern Ireland manager, O’Neill had a host of reliable centre-backs to call upon and is pleased to be developing strength in depth at the position once again.<\/p>\n
“It’s as strong as it’s been for a long time, if I’m honest,” he said.<\/p>\n
“You look back to the teams of the past, when we had [Aaron] Hughes, [Jonny] Evans, [Gareth] McAuley, [Craig] Cathcart, we had really good options at centre-back, all playing at a good level.<\/p>\n
“I think with this team we have players who are at a different stage of their career but with huge potential, Ruairi and Tom in particular.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ballard’s latest injury continues a luckless run for one of Northern Ireland’s key figures. Since the start of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":907929,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-907928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=907928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907928\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/907929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=907928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=907928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=907928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}