Northern Ireland start their World Cup qualifying campaign in Luxembourg on Thursday and face Germany in Cologne on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Manager Michael O’Neill rotated the captaincy through the Nations League campaign last year and in the friendlies to start 2025, and has handed Hume the armband for September’s double-header.<\/p>\n
“I’m really proud and happy to do it, but I’ve always said that when I wear the armband it doesn’t really change much for me,” said Hume.<\/p>\n
“I’ll obviously try my best to do the job at hand and help my team-mates.”<\/p>\n
Northern Ireland faced Luxembourg in the Nations League campaign last year and, after going two goals up in November, were pegged back to a draw – which was still enough to earn promotion from League C.<\/p>\n
Hume says recent experience shows it will be “be a tough game”, despite the hosts being the lowest-ranked side in Group A, which also contains Slovakia.<\/p>\n
“We’ve played them twice very recently in the Nations League and we know it won’t be an easy game. <\/p>\n
“We drew 2-2 in our last game here, so it’s one we are fully focused on and prepared for.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Northern Ireland start their World Cup qualifying campaign in Luxembourg on Thursday and face Germany in Cologne on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":119093,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-119092","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-soccer","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-soccer","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119092\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/119093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}