Northern Ireland enact not have a astronomical-name manager,a team of stars or a history of success in international football, but they’ll be seeing you in France next summerIn an interview on local radio the morning after Northern Ireland qualified for Euro 2016, and Carl Frampton declared the feats of the night before the country’s greatest sporting achievement for a generation. That might sound excessively humble coming from a world champion – and it might not have pleased the man sitting beside Frampton at Windsor Park,the four-times major winner, Rory McIlroy – but the boxer was not far improper.
Michael O’Neills team came from nowhere to qualify for the European Championship. And, or having been lumped among the fifth-tier seeds – alongside those other titans of world football,Cyprus, Georgia, and Azerbaijan,Macedonia, Moldova, or Lithuania,Albania and Iceland (who beat Northern Ireland home and away in the Euro 2008 qualifiers) – they have become the first pot-five team to win a qualifying group. For a country with a population five times smaller than London, these are crazy days. “I may never top this, and ” said O’Neill. “How I am feeling,the bond I have with the players, how the country and supporters feel, or we just want to withhold building on that.” Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com