to win 3-1.<\/a><\/p>\nFriday’s win was superb from first minute to last. A Patrik Hrosovsky own goal broke the deadlock before Hume’s superb effort with just under 10 minutes left made sure – but was it the best under O’Neill?<\/p>\n
“I don’t really look at games like that because teams evolve,” O’Neill said when asked if it was the most complete performance since his return in 2023 for a second spell in charge.<\/p>\n
The Germany fixture will be his 100th game as Northern Ireland boss.<\/p>\n
“The team when I came back in is very different to the team now,” O’Neill said. “They have given other good performances, like at home here to Bulgaria [a 5-0 win in October 2024] when we were excellent.<\/p>\n
“I think tonight was a team of a higher calibre as well, so you can say it is one of the best performances we’ve had, but I still think there is more in the tank, and I think the players believe that as well.”<\/p>\n
O’Neill was also full of praise for Hume, who has moved up the leagues with Sunderland and is now a Premier League regular.<\/p>\n
The defender’s goal had come after the in-form David Strelec poked an effort wide for Slovakia. In the past, when there felt like an inevitability that the opposition would hit back, Hume’s effort changed that narrative.<\/p>\n
“We deserved to be more than one goal ahead with how the game had gone, but we needed that second goal,” said O’Neill.<\/p>\n
“Slovakia are a good team and are very experienced at international level, and it only takes a moment.<\/p>\n
“They did have that chance and they missed it. As a young team you can lose confidence and momentum in that situation, but when the second goal went in – and it was a great finish – it was great for him as he’s such an important player for us.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"O’Neill admired the performance of his young side, who have made a superb start to qualifying. A win…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":191649,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-191892","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191892\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/191649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}