Despite the loss, and his frustration, O’Neill still had time for a joke with a member of the German media.<\/p>\n
“Having looked at the stats, ironically Germany played more long balls than us in the game,” he said.<\/p>\n
For his part, Julian Nagelsmann, whose comments after the reverse fixture in Cologne prompted O’Neill’s quip, was relieved to get through a “tough” game.<\/p>\n
“The second half was all about defending,” Nagelsmann told BBC Sport. <\/p>\n
“As I said before the game it was a really tough opponent, a lot of long balls and they fight and we had to fight as well.<\/p>\n
“It was a good step in the right direction to beat a team like Northern Ireland and to fight for second balls and be as tough as the opponent.”<\/p>\n
Top spot in Group A is now a long shot given Germany have put their grasp on automatic qualification. <\/p>\n
But second place and a guaranteed play-off is still on the cards ahead of November’s two qualifiers in Slovakia and home to bottom side Luxembourg.<\/p>\n
It may not be much consolation now, but a play-off as one of four Nations League group winners seems to be a more secure fall back given other results across Europe, if Northern Ireland were to miss out on the top two. <\/p>\n
So, after battling but falling short against one of Europe’s giants, this young Northern Ireland side may be down, but they are definitely not out. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Despite the loss, and his frustration, O’Neill still had time for a joke with a member of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":198476,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-198475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198475","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=198475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}