O’Neill accepts pressure now on to bounce back against Serbia

With Serbia opening up a two-point gap at the top of Group D and Wales closing to within two in third place, Ireland are suddenly feeling the World Cup squeeze after a desperately poor performance away to Georgia.

After other key results on Saturday brought mainly ominous news for Ireland’s World Cup ambitions, and in the wake of his own side’s much-criticised performance in that 1-1 draw in Tbilisi, Martin O’Neill says he’ll consider making changes to his team for tomorrow night’s crunch game against Serbia at the Aviva.

“Well, we’ll take a look at it,” he said. “Yes, I’ve got one or two champing at the bit and that’s encouraging. There was definitely a sense of disappointment in the dressing-room on Saturday.

“I think that’s to do with our first half performance because we should do better; we really should do better at international level.

“It’s a step up and you are playing against sides who are technically decent. Each team that we play is technically decent and we have to address that.

“I think the players will be well aware themselves that we did not play well enough in the first half.

“We scored early on, we sat back, and it’s all very well sitting back and allowing the other side to have possession but at some stage you have to get closer to players, that’s just the name of the game. But we didn’t do that, we allowed them to dictate matters and when we did have the ball we didn’t deal well enough with it.

“As a consequence, they had much more possession and when they did score, whether it was our fault or not, they probably deserved to do so.

“In the second half, we started getting a bit closer to them; we started to create a few chances. The game stretched and it was end to end for about 10 or 15 minutes towards the end and in that time we had two or three chances to score.

“So from that viewpoint, that was encouraging but definitely, in terms of the first half performance, we have to address that and do a lot better — because Serbia are a class act.”

On why he opted to spring Aiden McGeady rather than Wes Hoolahan from the bench in the Dinamo Arena, O’Neill added: “Aiden McGeady has scored a couple of goals. It’s nothing to do with horses for courses. Aiden had played games for Sunderland and he’s in cracking form. Wes hasn’t played all the time for Norwich but we’ll address it, we’ll see how we are before Tuesday.”

Such minor positives as there were from Saturday for O’Neill — apart from Ireland not actually losing the game — included a reasonably clean bill of health and no-one ruled out of tomorrow because of a yellow card.

“For the likes of Jon Walters to get through the 90 minutes, that was encouraging because hadn’t played a great deal. Shane Long, as you know, hasn’t played a lot of football so we’ll assess them now. It was James (McClean, who was not already on a yellow) who got booked and I suppose from that viewpoint it’s good: At least we have players to choose from.”

The immediate goal now, of course, is for Ireland to try to bounce back against the team O’Neill has long since maintained is the best in the group.

“What the result on Saturday does mean is that it puts pressure on us to go and try to win this game,” he said.

“This match on Tuesday night becomes the total focal point. I know Serbia have a game against Austria and that won’t be easy but really, in essence, if we are going to come through (as group winners), we are going to have to win it and play much better than we did on Saturday.

“We remain unbeaten away from home which is difficult in World Cup qualifying. But it was always going to be tough.

“I’m not saying this for the sake of saying it. It was always going to be this tight. We’ve left two points behind and we have to try to address that on Tuesday.”