Northern Ireland 2-0 Belarus: ‘We’ve got a lot of captains on that pitch’ – Charles
Charles revealed that despite O’Neill’s team’s dominance, O’Neill’s team fell into a blank in the opening stage and there was no sense of panic in the Northern Ireland dressing room at halftime.
In their last match in Hungary in October, Northern Ireland drew 0-0 with Belarus but failed to break down the Belarusian defense.
This time, Ballard scored from a corner five minutes after the break and Dion Charles scored in the 63rd minute after Kirill Pechenin was adjudged to have handballed him in the penalty area. Charles scored a penalty kick.
“When we came in we said we couldn’t really let it get into the slowdown of the game and then we scored early in the second half and we scored our second goal, so that was good.
“I wasn’t too worried, we knew we could go out and score goals, we learned from the last game. Michael just came in and told us we had to exploit certain areas to try and score goals, so ultimately from a set piece, Things we’ve already done.
“When you score, it’s important not to sit back and I think we did that. When we scored the second goal, we knew we could step back and try to control it. We did that successfully.”
Northern Ireland’s win was their third consecutive home win in Nations League Group C3 and they will now end their season away to Luxembourg on Monday.
A draw in this match was enough for NI to advance as top of the group.
“Everyone wants to go there and get our first away win of the season and I think we’re more than capable of doing that,” Charles added.
