Northern Ireland v Austria

PRESIDENT’S WELCOME

On behalf of the Irish Football Association it gives me great pleasure to welcome the officials, players and supporters of Austria to the National Football Stadium in Belfast for today’s Group B game in UEFA’s Nations League competition.

This new UEFA competition has, of course, drawn Northern Ireland with Austria and Bosnia & Herzegovina in a three-country group and to date we have lost all three matches played despite good performances by the team. Since our last home game against Bosnia & Herzegovina on 8 September we have defeated Israel 3-0 in a mandatory friendly and embarked on a ‘double header’ trip during October to play our two away Nations League group games. We suffered defeats in both of those games but created enough chances to take something from them. The second mandatory friendly took place in Dublin on Thursday night and provided a keenly contested match at the Aviva Stadium. The scoreless draw doesn’t reflect the Northern Ireland performance in a game that we could have won. Austria travel to Belfast on the back of having secured second place in the group with a 0-0 draw at home to Bosnia & Herzegovina, leaving Northern Ireland relegated to Nations League C. Despite that there is still much to play for today, including FIFA ranking points, and I am looking forward to an exciting game. UEFA will now park the Nations League competition as the attention of all 55 UEFA member

associations turns to Dublin where the draw for the Euro 2020 qualifying group stages takes place on 2 December. When the 20 countries from the qualifying series have been determined the Nations League will resume for its knock-out phase. This late afternoon/early evening game has been sold out for some days and the large crowd will add that extra support to the team in an effort to get a win and gain some momentum to carry forward to the Euro 2020 campaign. Today’s date is significant in the history of the Irish Football Association because it is exactly 138 years ago that the Irish Football Association was founded - and it’s wonderful that the fourth oldest association in the world is still going strong, so Happy Birthday Irish FA. Christmas is just six weeks away and on behalf of everyone at the Irish Football Association I hope that you all enjoy the festive period and have a happy and peaceful New Year. Enjoy the game and have a safe journey home. David J Martin President Irish Football Association

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