Friendlies take on own meaning
You will often here people casually dismiss games like this as “meaningless friendlies” but I would argue that friendlies are very much what you make of them and how seriously — individually as a player and collectively as a team — you take them.
And, of course, if such a game represents your first appearance for your country or even a chance for an emerging player to really stake a claim to a place in the first 11, then they could hardly be more meaningful. I know this well from personal experience because four years ago this month I made my Irish debut on a rainy night at Croke Park in a friendly against Poland.