\n<\/p>\n
Jamie Donley’s first international goal was enough to give Northern Ireland a 1-0 win over Luxembourg in their final Group A qualifier for the 2026 World Cup.<\/b><\/p>\n
The Tottenham Hotspur attacker, who represented England at under-age level, was making just his second international start in what was effectively a dead rubber and settled the game from the penalty spot in the final minute before half-time. <\/p>\n
The hosts came into the game already assured of their place in a play-off semi-final for next summer’s tournament thanks to their success in last year’s Nations League, while also not able to finish any higher than third in their group.<\/p>\n
As such, manager Michael O’Neill made six changes from Friday’s 1-0 defeat by Slovakia in Kosice that ended any hopes of a top-two finish. <\/p>\n
Donley was one of those brought in and the player on loan at Stoke for this season thought he had opened the scoring in the 18th minute with a neat finish into the corner, but Ethan Galbraith had been offside before squaring the ball.<\/p>\n
Goalkeeper Conor Hazard had to be alert to prevent Christopher Martins giving Luxembourg a surprise lead before Mathias Olesen whistled an effort past the post as the visitors grew into the half.<\/p>\n
The only goal of a dour contest came when Donley coolly converted the penalty awarded after the video assistant referee (VAR) adjudged Martins had kicked the leg of Ciaron Brown in an attempted clearance. <\/p>\n
O’Neill rested Conor Bradley for the second half, replacing the Liverpool defender with Portsmouth’s Terry Devlin at the break, while there was a further change five minutes later when Brad Lyons limped off to be replaced by Paul Smyth. <\/p>\n
With so little at stake, and both managers using the opportunity to look at their options, the second half lacked many real opportunities with Isaac Price’s pair of tame efforts in the final minutes the closest either side came to finding a second-half goal.<\/p>\n
In Group A’s other game, Germany beat Slovakia 6-0 to secure top spot and automatic qualification for next summer’s tournament in North America. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Jamie Donley’s first international goal was enough to give Northern Ireland a 1-0 win over Luxembourg in their final Group A qualifier for the 2026 World Cup. The Tottenham Hotspur attacker, who represented England at under-age level, was making just his second international start in what was effectively a dead rubber and settled the game<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1470,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-football"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1469\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}