Republic of Ireland must overcome Belgium or Poland again if they are to qualify for the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup following the play-off draw this morning.<\/p>\n
The Girls in Green were handed a favourable first round tie against the side ranked 100th in the world, Kazahkstan, with the winner to progress to a decider to reach the outright tournament.<\/p>\n
That game will be against a side Ireland are very familiar with.<\/p>\n
Carla Ward’s side recorded narrow home and away victories over Poland in the UEFA Nations League recently, while they battled to a 5-4 relegation play-off over Belgium in the same competition at the end of last year.<\/p>\n
Poland and Belgium will meet firstly in their bid to progress to Round 2.<\/p>\n
The matches with Kazakhstan will take place from 7-13 October, while the Belgium\/Poland tie will be played in late November and early December, if Ireland go through.<\/p>\n
Northern Ireland have drawn Portugal, Wales play Albania and Scotland face the Czech Republic.<\/p>\n
England will play Greece in the first round. <\/p>\n
Should England, the 2023 World Cup runners-up, advance to round two, they will play the winner of Slovakia vs Ukraine.<\/p>\n
Northern Ireland would play Croatia or Iceland, Wales would face Romania or Norway, and Scotland could see themselves taking on either Lithuania or Sweden.<\/p>\n
The seven best-ranked winners from round two qualify for next year’s finals, while the remaining winner will still need to win the inter-confederation play-off.<\/p>\n
European teams enter the second round of that play-off, taking place in February 2027.<\/p>\n
Watch every game of the FIFA 2026 World Cup live on RT\u00c9 with highlights on RT\u00c9 Sport digital platforms and live blogs on RT\u00c9.ie\/sport and RT\u00c9 News app <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Republic of Ireland must overcome Belgium or Poland again if they are to qualify for the 2027 FIFA…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":506033,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-506032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506032","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=506032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506032\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/506033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=506032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=506032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=506032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}