Oxford beat Blackburn 1-0 at the Kassam Stadium<\/a> earlier this month.<\/p>\n“I think 80% of my squad play in the EFL so I am aware of that situation,” O’Neill said.<\/p>\n
“We’re mindful of the situation for the clubs, of course, but when the clubs signed these players they knew they were international players. <\/p>\n
“We’re not going to be reckless with the players or anything like that. But we have to look after ourselves as a group of players, so the most important thing is that the players just go out and play the game. <\/p>\n
“They will be fine. The lads who play in the EFL they play a lot of football and they are used to playing regular football. They have a lot of resilience so I’m sure they’ll get through the game fine.”<\/p>\n
O’Neill has been in charge at Ewood Park since February, when he replaced Valerien Ismael.<\/p>\n
The 56-year-old had a similar agreement – combining duties with club and country – with Stoke City when his first spell as Northern Ireland manager came to a close in 2020.<\/p>\n
However, the Covid-19 pandemic delayed the Euro 2020 play-offs and O’Neill left his role before those games took place.<\/p>\n
After being sacked by the Potters in August 2022, he returned to Northern Ireland, signing a contract that runs until after the Euro 2028 campaign.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Northern Ireland’s match in Cardiff comes less than 72 hours before Oxford host Hull City on Friday when,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":505345,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-505344","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505344","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=505344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505344\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/505345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=505344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=505344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=505344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}