Confidence the key for Doherty

Republic of Ireland defender Matt Doherty admitted that confidence took a hit with the dreadful recent run of run of results for the Boys in Green. However the Spurs player reckons that Ireland is on the right track now after Thursday’s confidence boosting 4-1 win over Andorra.

“It was a very big win for us in terms of confidence,” said Doherty about Ireland’s first win in 13 matches when speaking via Zoom with the Irish football media over the weekend. “We haven’t won a game in such a long time so it was good just to wipe the slate clean and kick on.”

Stephen Kenny has been in charge for a dozen games since March of last year but his team had drawn four and lost seven of those matches before finally getting the win this week.  

“It was starting to get to the point no matter who we were playing against, it was going to be a difficult game,” said Doherty who admitted doubts began to creep in after all those defeats. 

“It is like anything if you have a run of losses, you start to doubt yourself and your confidence takes a hit. If we were confident, we wouldn’t have lost that many games. The confidence is not at its highest point but how could it be after that amount of losses.

“The first few games we believed we were playing well and were unfortunate – Slovakia being the main one. At times we just couldn’t put the ball in the back of the net and it is an accumulation of all these things that don’t go your way.

"Two games go by, then three and then it is six and seven games go by (without a win) and it becomes the story everyone is talking about and it is playing on your mind.

“We had a lot of COVID problems in some of the other national team camps. It was disruptive more for the manager and he had to change the squad the whole time. Results wise it doesn’t look great. But performance wise there were performances there where we feel we should have won a few games and drawn against Serbia.

"There are improvements there. I’m not going to get too disheartened or too down as we have lost games. There is some steady progress.”

A win was required against Andorra but the Boys in Green fell behind to the principality on 52 minutes before a brace from Troy Parrott along with goals from Jason Knight and Daryl Horgan got Ireland a 4-1 win – their biggest winning margin in five years since a 4-0 victory in the most recent friendly game against Oman. 

“1-0 down I felt like it was almost the end of the world,” said Doherty. “It wasn’t looking pretty but we managed to switch on and it was maybe the wake up call that we needed to get us into gear and it was a comfortable enough for us in the end.

"We have won the first one now and we now look to go and win in Hungary and stay unbeaten as long as possible.”

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