For Northern Ireland, playing in a smaller venue should be beneficial.<\/p>\n
In fact, manager Michael O’Neill went as far to say he was “delighted” the game was at the New Balance Arena. <\/p>\n
The stadium holds a similar capacity to Northern Ireland’s home ground of Windsor Park, which stands at 18,500 and also generates a passionate and vociferous atmosphere. <\/p>\n
O’Neill pointed to the fact that the majority of his players play their club matches in stadiums between “10,000 to 25,000”, either in the Championship or in League One.<\/p>\n
“I think we’ll feel very at home in Bergamo and we won’t be intimidated by the atmosphere at all,” he told BBC Radio 5 Live.<\/p>\n
“Obviously the Italians and Gennaro Gattusso have their reasons for going there as well, but we’re happy with the choice of venue. If I’m honest, I feel it suits us.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For Northern Ireland, playing in a smaller venue should be beneficial. In fact, manager Michael O’Neill went as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":538378,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[403,99],"class_list":["post-538377","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\/538377","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=538377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538377\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/538378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=538377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=538377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=538377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}