Northern Ireland manager Michael O'Neill has condemned the booing of God Save The Queen ahead of tonight's 0-0 international friendly draw in Dublin. Ahead of kick-off, the anthem was met with loud, sustained boos, and O'Neill said after the game that it isn't something he supports.
At the end of the day, I don't get involved in this kind of thing. At the end of the day, when people come to a football ground, and decide to boo an anthem, that's their decision.
I don't particularly agree with it, I would never condone anyone booing anyone's anthem, but that's not something I'm in control of. I don't want to dwell on that too much, I concentrate on football.
The game was played in a great spirit, there was great respect between both sets of players, it was very competitive and when tackles went in, you could see players picking eachother up. You could see there was a great respect between both players, and that's the most important thing.
Elsewhere, O'Neill admitted that his side should have won, but reserved some praise for man of the match Darren Randolph.
I think we should have won that game. In terms of possession of the ball and chances created, we should have won the game. We have to commend Darren Randolph, I thought he had a great night and made important saves at key moments in the game. We are pleased with the performance but there is a pattern there like in our games in the Nations League in that we dominated the game without taking the chances we created.
He then expanded on his opinion of Ireland, and drew similarities between the job he is doing.
It's not for me to speak about the opposition. We knew what the Republic of Ireland would be [like]. Martin is in a similar situation to me, he's trying to integrate new players into his team. He had two relatively inexperienced centre-backs at this level coming in tonight, and we had relative inexperience at full-back and in wide areas.
You have to give players a chance to get to this level, and at the end of the day the Republic weren't beaten, so they can take that out of the game.
