Republic of Ireland lost their opening two games of the group 2-1, against France and Netherlands in March, before recovering in April to win both their games against Poland.<\/p>\n
The positive momentum generated from those two results rolled into June and they showed great resilience to beat Netherlands 3-2 at a rain-soaked Cork on Friday to set up the winner takes all showdown with France in Grenoble.<\/p>\n
While Ward always felt that they could aim higher than a third place finish which would see them remain in the top tier and secure a play-off, she is pleased her side have followed through and put themselves in this position.<\/p>\n
“Everyone called it the group of death but we saw it as an opportunity for this group to show what they’re about,” she added. <\/p>\n
“The group deserve an awful lot of credit because they’re showing it in abundance.”<\/p>\n
Ward acknowledges that Republic of Ireland come into this game as huge underdogs, given that Les Bleues have a stacked squad, but her side have “nothing to lose and everything to gain” with France under pressure to win at home.<\/p>\n
“I expect the French to come after us but I don’t think they will underestimate us, they were really respectful when we played them last time. We have to manage every moment so we’ll leave no stone unturned.<\/p>\n
“The pressure is off and I mean it when I say it, there is a real calm and a real focus on the game. The processes stay the same and nothing will change.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Republic of Ireland lost their opening two games of the group 2-1, against France and Netherlands in March,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":490147,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-490146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490146","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=490146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490146\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/490147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}