Heimir Hallgrimsson believes Ireland can rescue their World Cup qualification mission by winning two of their last four matches.<\/p>\n
One point gained from the opening pair of qualifiers last month leaves Ireland already playing catch-up before they travel to take on top seeds Portugal next in Lisbon on Saturday week.<\/p>\n
Only the pool winner is guaranteed a ticket to next year\u2019s tournament co-hosted by USA, Mexico and Canada but the Ireland manager feels his team can still snare the runners-up spot to enter the playoffs next March.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to beat Armenia at home and Hungary away,\u201d said the Icelander, referencing the final game of the six in Budapest on November 15.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat’s six points, plus the one we already have.<\/p>\n
\u201cSeven points in the end would mean that could come down to goal difference. So that’s why we need to take this game against Portugal seriously.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we’re in a position that we cannot be thinking long term after this first window.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to focus on one game at a time, whether that will give us one point, three points or zero.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’m not saying it (seven) will be definite because we don’t know how the other games will go.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s not like we’re going over to lose against Portugal but we need to win in Armenia.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ireland\u2019s collapse in the 2-1 defeat to bottom seeds Armenia triggered a tweak to his squad rather than overhaul. Killian Phillips has gone from back-up midfielder to axed from the squad. Jayson Molumby, in from the cold, may be abseiled straight back into central midfield as a direct replacement for the injured Jason Knight.<\/p>\n
Former captains S\u00e9amus Coleman and John Egan also earn recalls to address, among other deficits, the leadership shortage evident in the September double-header but Nathan Collins will retain the armband for the remainder of the campaign.<\/p>\n
Hallgrimsson had confessed after the Yerevan horror-show that a miracle was required to salvage a qualification route.<\/p>\n
That prospect will vanish unless at least one win is extracted and it\u2019s uncertain if the manager will stick around for the November finale of Portugal in Dublin and Hungary away.<\/p>\n
His contract is linked to Ireland\u2019s involvement in the campaign.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don’t want to be where I’m not wanted,\u201d he surmised.<\/p>\n
“Before the last camp, we spoke about having contract talks after the camp but from speaking to the FAI chief executive (David Courell) and president (Paul Cooke), I said let’s postpone that until after the tournament.<\/p>\n
“Let’s just move that away. Probably an agent or another coach would like to sign a long-term contract and then be fired or whatever but I’m not that kind of way.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Heimir Hallgrimsson believes Ireland can rescue their World Cup qualification mission by winning two of their last four…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58099,"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-58098","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\/58098","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=58098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58098\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}