While he was content with their defensive efforts, Hallgrimsson was left to rue the Republic of Ireland’s inability to threaten Portugal at the other end.<\/p>\n
The Icelandic boss maintains, however, the positives in Lisbon outweighed the negatives as his side restored some pride following their humbling in Yerevan last month.<\/p>\n
“We felt of course [we deserved a point] because we spent a lot of energy,” he added.<\/p>\n
“They had more chances than we did, but we had our openings and if we were cleverer on the ball, but when you waste energy defending, the decision-making when you get the chance is not perfect. <\/p>\n
“We should be proud, not happy, but there are a lot of good things to take from it. It was a team performance; everyone did their job. There were no passengers in this game.”<\/p>\n
Republic of Ireland are still bottom of Group F with one point after three games and now face a must-win game against Armenia at home on Tuesday to keep their slim hopes of reaching next year’s tournament in North America alive through a play-off spot.<\/p>\n
Hallgrimsson hoped the diligent display will give them a boost to their belief.<\/p>\n
“Confidence is a tricky thing, you never know what gives you confidence or takes away your confidence,” he said. “We should at least be happy with the team performance.<\/p>\n
“I’m just wary of what lies ahead of us in that [Armenia] game so now we need to shift focus and try to leave this in Portugal and be ready come Tuesday.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While he was content with their defensive efforts, Hallgrimsson was left to rue the Republic of Ireland’s inability…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":218238,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[403,99],"class_list":["post-218237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218237\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/218238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}