Michael O’Neill has made clear that his Northern Ireland players will not be measured against the side that beat Ukraine at Euro 2016. Speaking to BBC Sport NI in Trnava ahead of the latest meeting between the two nations, the manager said that win is not something he uses as a benchmark for the current group.
Slovakia is hosting the fixture because of the ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia.
“We don’t keep reflecting back on that game and telling the players this is what we aspire to be. This team hopefully can write its own history and we have to allow them to do that.”
O’Neill accepts that supporters and the media will keep returning to the summer of 2016. He was in the dugout in Lyon that day. Play was halted by hailstones, Gareth McAuley scored with a header and Niall McGinn added the second, while the travelling fans kept the ‘Will Grigg’s on fire’ chant going throughout. It remains one of the most celebrated results in the country’s football history, and it came 10 years ago.
His reluctance to lean on that afternoon has a practical basis. Very little of that squad is left. Of the players with Northern Ireland in Slovakia this week, only two were part of the Euro 2016 group, and Josh Magennis is one of them.
That near-total turnover means the dressing room O’Neill now manages has almost no first-hand link to Lyon. Holding up a decade-old performance as the standard would ask a largely new set of players to live up to a game most of them never played in. His stated approach is to let this group build its own record instead.
For O’Neill, the next chapter starts against the same opponents, this time in Trnava.
