O’Neill: ‘Italy will be as tough as it gets’ for Northern Ireland in World Cup play-offs

Northern Ireland head coach Michael O’Neill admits that drawing Italy in the World Cup play-off semi-final is ‘as tough as we can get’, but has urged his players to ‘believe we can go there and get an amazing result’. 

Italy will host Northern Ireland in a single-legged World Cup play-off semi-final on March 26, following the completion of the play-off draw at the FIFA headquarters in Switzerland on Thursday afternoon. 

The winner of that tie will go on to face either Wales or Bosnia and Herzegovina away a few days later on March 31. That will also be a one-off match, and the winner will progress to the final World Cup tournament in North America in the summer. 

You can see how the World Cup play-off draw unfolded on the Football Italia Liveblog.

Northern Ireland finished their qualification group in third place, behind Germany and Slovakia, but earned a place in the play-offs as a result of their Nations League finish. 

Of the four teams that Italy could have been drawn against in the play-off semi-finals, Northern Ireland are the lowest ranked: Sweden are currently 43rd in the latest FIFA rankings, which were updated on Wednesday, Romania are 47th, North Macedonia 65th and Northern Ireland 69th. Italy are currently 12th. 

O’Neill, speaking after Thursday’s draw, did not deny the fact that Italy will be a tough ask for his players. 

“It’s a tough draw. We always felt it would be. You have to take what you get in this situation. We always knew we were going to be away from home,” he said. 

“Italy will be as tough as we can get, but ultimately we have to believe we can go there and get an amazing result. It would be one of the biggest results in our history if we can do that. We have to believe as a young team that we are capable of doing that.”

He continued: “We gave a good account of ourselves in our World Cup qualifying campaign away from home, albeit the result in Germany went away from us in the last 20 minutes and the game in Slovakia we lost via a corner in injury time.

“I think the team has developed over the six qualifying games and a big thing for us will be to be as strong as possible come March.

“We obviously dealt with injuries and some suspensions in the six games that we had and there’s no doubt that affected us, but hopefully we will be as close to full strength as possible in March.”