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Comfortable co-hosts? The weight of history and how Mexico & Canada are shaping up for the tournament<\/p>\nIreland manager Carla Ward said she could not disguise her pride after a 1-0 defeat to France in Grenoble which condemned Ireland to a World Cup playoff in October. <\/p>\n
Victory against the seventh-in-the-world French would have earned Ireland direct qualification for next year\u2019s tournament in Brazil, but instead Ireland were left to rue a series of missed second-half chances as their opponents clung on in the wake of Thiniba Samnoura\u2019s red card. <\/p>\n
\u201cI am incredibly proud of the group and so should everyone,\u201d said Ward. \u201cThey have been sensational this campaign. They have come close again tonight against one of the best teams in the world, and my God, did France turn up tonight. They were brilliant.<\/p>\n
\u201cI credit my players, so proud of the performance. And look, if anyone had said we would be in this position, we would have snapped your hand off. We are disappointed to have lost the game and that tells you an awful lot about how far we have come.<\/p>\n
Comfortable co-hosts? The weight of history and how Mexico & Canada are shaping up for the tournament<\/p>\n
\u201cI have nothing but love and pride for this group. They give everything for that badge and if I am a young girl looking at this group, then I am inspired.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can see from the celebrations at the end, that wasn\u2019t easy tonight, we made it difficult for them. And the fact that the entire French crowd clapped our players off the pitch, it tells another story. So it\u2019s just nothing but pride.\u201d<\/p>\n
The only goal of the game was Melvine Malard\u2019s acrobatic overhead kick shortly before the end of a first half dominated by the French. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe di d prepare for an onslaught,\u201d admitted Ward. \u201cAnd I think we managed that in the first 20 minutes, we really did, because we knew they would want to try and pull us out with all their rotations. We didn\u2019t allow them to. It\u2019s taken a moment of magic, hasn\u2019t it? It\u2019s taken an overhead kick from a wonderful individual.\u201d <\/p>\n
With France heading directly for the World Cup, Ireland will instead turn their attention to the playoff draw in Zurich on June 18th. They must win a pair of two-legged ties to qualify for the World Cup, but a third-place finish in qualifying means Ireland have earned the more favourable, seeded playoff path.<\/p>\n
First they will play a League C minnow \u2013 one of Romania, Greece, Kosovo, Hungary, Croatia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, or Lithuania \u2013 and, should they progress, will play a two-legged final against a side that finished no higher than bottom of a League A group. Ireland are guaranteed to avoid heavy-hitters such as England and the Netherlands. <\/p>\n
Captain Katie McCabe agreed with her manager\u2019s assertion that Ireland would have taken this outcome at the start of the campaign. <\/p>\n
\u201cFor sure, everyone counted us out and expected us to finish bottom. We have pushed some of the top nations, lots to improve and dissect, but we will be ready to go again in October.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ireland manager Carla Ward said she could not disguise her pride after a 1-0 defeat to France in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":491513,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[18999,61,60,19002,43,18998],"class_list":["post-491512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-carla-ward","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-katie-mccabe","tag-news","tag-republic-of-ireland-wnt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491512","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=491512"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491512\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/491513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}