World Cup qualifiers: New Northern Ireland side ready for world stage

Such is the nature of the international football calendar that when Northern Ireland begin their efforts to make it to the 2026 World Cup against Luxembourg on Thursday it will be their first qualifying game in almost two years.

A 2-0 win over Denmark at Windsor Park in October 2023 was the last time Michael O’Neill’s side faced such a fixture with their success over the Euro 2024-bound side proving to be something of an outlier in recent times.

In the side’s preceding 17 qualifiers, they enjoyed just four victories, a pair of wins over both San Marino and Lithuania.

If that run of results across two qualifying campaigns appeared to herald the end of a golden era for the side during which they qualified for Euro 2016 and reached play-offs for the World Cup of 2018 and Euro 2020, then the changing face of the squad across the next 23 months hammered home the point.

Since that last qualifying fixture, Steven Davis, Stuart Dallas, Craig Cathcart and the Evans brothers, Jonny and Corry, have all retired from football.

In their place, an exciting young core centred around Conor Bradley, Isaac Price, Shea Charles and Trai Hume has emerged to lead the side into a campaign that will see them take on Germany and Slovakia as well as Luxembourg.

“That game against Denmark was probably the start of it,” said manager Michael O’Neill.

“It was quite a young team that played that night and it was a really positive result for us after a challenging campaign for 2024 which brought a closure on a lot of players’ careers at international level.

“Over the last two years, we’ve had to develop and grow a team. We’ve maybe put young players in at times when maybe it was a little bit early, but we felt that was the right thing to do.

“Over the two years, I think that’s proven to be the right thing to do and we have a group of players now that are still very young, still got a lot to achieve.”