Michael O\u2019Neill fumed at a goal that \u201cshould clearly have been disallowed\u201d after Northern Ireland\u2019s hopes of progressing from World Cup qualifying Group A were ended by Slovakia debutant Tomas Bobcek in a 1-0 stoppage-time defeat in Kosice.<\/p>\n
Bobcek, who had only been on the pitch for three minutes, prodded in after Bailey Peacock-Farrell failed to deal with a corner, but Northern Ireland were enraged that a foul was not given as Daniel Ballard had gone down under pressure from Leo Sauer.<\/p>\n
That was in the first minute of eight added on, and there was further misery for a shorthanded Northern Ireland as Ballard was shown a soft second yellow card to earn a red while O\u2019Neill was himself booked by referee Istvan Kovacs after the final whistle.<\/p>\n
Slovakia had already seen second-half strikes from Lukas Haraslin and David Strelec chalked off for offside and handball respectively.<\/p>\n
Northern Ireland ended the night assured of a qualifying play-off place via the Nations League after Croatia beat the Faroe Islands 3-1, but frustration was the primary emotion.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re always disappointed when you lose a game late as we did, especially to a goal that should clearly have been disallowed,\u201d O\u2019Neill said. \u201cThere\u2019s a clear push on Daniel Ballard at the corner, two hands on his back.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe other two goals that were disallowed should have been disallowed. The first goal was offside, the lines clearly show that, the second goal was handball.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have to look at each incident on its merit, you can\u2019t look at it cumulatively and referee the last incident differently from how you\u2019ve refereed the other two. That\u2019s what (VAR) is there for\u2026<\/p>\n
\u201cBailey will know he should have done better. He comes when maybe he doesn\u2019t need to come\u2026 but ultimately it\u2019s still a foul.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked what he said to the referee after the match, O\u2019Neill added: \u201cI said to the referee that he needed to be stronger and he booked me. But I went to shake his hand. I said, \u2018you need to be stronger\u2019 and that was enough for him to book me. If I\u2019m not allowed to say that, then I shouldn\u2019t have said that.\u201d<\/p>\n
O\u2019Neill was also unhappy with the Slovakian bench, which emptied in wild celebrations after the winning goal, with home coach Francesco Calzona refusing a handshake at the final whistle.<\/p>\n
In a tense, scrappy game in which the best opportunities for both teams all came from set-pieces, Northern Ireland \u2013 missing Shea Charles, Ali McCann and Ethan Galbraith in midfield \u2013 battled hard but struggled to find any fluidity.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were aspects of the performance that could have been better,\u201d O\u2019Neill said. \u201cThere\u2019s no doubt about that. I felt the lads that came in, Brad Lyons did extremely well, George Saville did extremely well, Ruairi (McConville) was excellent, just a young player coming into that type of game.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were missing maybe five starters from our team and that\u2019s a lot for us to carry. The game was decided by set-pieces and Slovakia were better at set-pieces than we were. Our delivery wasn\u2019t as good and we missed Shea in terms of his delivery.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Michael O\u2019Neill fumed at a goal that \u201cshould clearly have been disallowed\u201d after Northern Ireland\u2019s hopes of progressing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":141141,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1113,61,60,2539,5782,43,5783],"class_list":{"0":"post-141140","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ireland","8":"tag-fai","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-league-of-ireland","12":"tag-local-soccer","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-premiership"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141140\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/141141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}