The loss in the penultimate fixture in the campaign does still damage their hopes of making it to North America, however, as they will enter those play-offs in the lowest group of seeds.<\/p>\n
Slovakia originally thought they had taken the lead in the 56th minute when Lukas Haraslin’s free-kick flew past Bailey Peacock-Farrell, but it was adjudged that Milan Skriniar had obstructed the view of the Northern Ireland goalkeeper.<\/p>\n
Just eight minutes later, they had another strike disallowed by VAR after David Strelec was penalised for handling the ball when finishing from another Haraslin set-piece.<\/p>\n
O’Neill felt that the decisions to rule out the previous efforts played into allowing the late winner.<\/p>\n
“It was a clear push on Daniel Ballard at the corner, two hands in his back,” said O’Neill.<\/p>\n
“The other goals that were disallowed should have been disallowed. The first one was offside, the lines show that clearly, and the second one was handball. <\/p>\n
“You have to look at each incident on its own merit, you can’t go cumulative and referee the last incident differently to how you refereed the other two incidents.”<\/p>\n
Following the winning goal, Ballard was sent off for a second yellow card offence and midfielder George Saville was booked with both players now ruled out of Monday night’s game with Luxembourg through suspension.<\/p>\n
On Ballard’s second yellow, O’Neill said: “The Slovakian dug-out that caused that as much as anything.”<\/p>\n
“The [second] yellow card for Daniel is a joke,” he continued.<\/p>\n
“If you look at it back, it is poor. He is a top referee, he has refereed the Champions League final, he should have disallowed the goal.”<\/p>\n
The victory, which keeps alive Slovakia’s hopes of qualifying automatically for next summer’s tournament, sparked huge celebrations from the hosts with O’Neill describing their reaction as “disappointing”. <\/p>\n
“Everything was on the line for Slovakia. You could tell that by the way their technical area behaved towards the end of the game, which was disappointing.<\/p>\n
“Disappointing for their coach not to shake my hand.<\/p>\n
“Ultimately, we congratulate Slovakia because they can go to Germany and try to win the group.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The loss in the penultimate fixture in the campaign does still damage their hopes of making it to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":263694,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-263918","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\/263918","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=263918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263918\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/263694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}