Defeat may be a blessing, says O’Neill

Presumably on the basis that you learn as much if not more from failure than success, Martin O’Neill seems inclined to regard Ireland’s home defeat to Serbia on Wednesday as a blessing in disguise.

“Of course I’d like to win the games,” he reflects, “but I think that (with) the things we’re trying to achieve, sometimes you might get carried away if we’d gone and won there. Of course you can get a lot of confidence from winning the matches — and winning is very important — but sometimes you might get carried away in terms of a result if we had gone on and won it. It might have hidden a couple of things that we know can be exposed by teams. I haven’t a real major problem with that.”

While O’Neill continues to insist his team did “an awful lot pretty well” in the 2-1 defeat, he accepts there were issues at the back which need to be addressed.