Please, try again later
The road to Euro 2020 starts this Thursday evening for Northern Ireland but there is little margin for error in these qualifying campaigns and this is a match they really need to win. Estonia have never qualified for a major tournament and after a tough draw, their hopes of making next year’s showpiece are very slim.
Germany and the Netherlands are strongly expected to fill the top two positions in this group but Northern Ireland have proven time and time again that they can never be totally written off. In Belfast, they always fancy their chances. However they struggled in the recent UEFA Nations League, losing all of their four matches against Austria and Bosnia so they don’t take any real momentum into this game.
Estonia also made little impression in that competition, winning only 1 of their 6 matches. However that was their final game away to Greece and they did at least seem to improve as the competition went on. Along with Belarus, they are the outsiders for this group and it’s difficult really to see any way they can make the Finals.
This is an ageing Northern Ireland side in many respects and one that includes two 39 year olds, in the shape of Gareth McAuley and Aaron Hughes. However they should be able to field something very close to their strongest eleven with few injury concerns and they have sufficient experience and quality to negotiate this task.
A run of 2 wins from 13 internationals is a concern but they’ve played some strong sides over that period and on paper this is their easiest fixture since a trip to San Marino in 2017. Excluding a couple of non-FIFA friendlies in January, Estonia have also won just 2 of their last 13 games. 4 of their 6 Nations League games ended in defeats to nil, including back-to-back losses against a relatively limited Finland.
Overall, they don’t appear to have the sort of quality needed to really cause many problems against an organised and settled Northern Ireland side. Michael O’Neill’s men have won 12 of their last 17 home internationals and backing Northern Ireland & Under 3.5 Goals looks good here, given only 4 of those matches saw four or more goals in total.
Northern Ireland starts these qualifiers with 2 homegames against Estonia and Belarus so unless they screw something up then they'd have 6p in the bag before visiting Tallinn in june. It's the first official game between these teams since EURO2012 qualifiers where we won both matches (4:1 at home and 2:1 on the road) but i guess it's (sadly) safe to say that neither team isn't the same like 8 years ago ... However since our last h2h game Northern Ireland have played 18 official games at home(W8D4L6) - they scored in 15 of them but managed to keep just 7 clean sheets. I'd say that luckily for them we are still quite bad away from home cause since our 2:1 win in Belfast we've played 19 competive awaygames(W3D4L12) - apart from these wins which were to nil we've managed to keep just 3 more clean sheets - all in games which ended goalless and during these 19 games we actually failed to score in 13 so no surprise there and what's even worse is that in EURO16 qualifiers we didn't score single goal in awaygames(even against San Marino) so definitely it can't get any worse ...