Northern Ireland manager Michael O’Neill feels Shea Charles must learn from his red card after his team lost 1-0 to Slovenia in Euro 2024 qualifying.
During Northern Ireland’s qualification campaign, Charles has been a regular, starting all eight games.
On four minutes, the Saints midfielder was booked for dissent for challenging the controversial decision to award Slovenia the free kick, from which Adam Cerin scored the game-winning goal.
In the 58th minute, a late tackle on Andraz Sporar was deemed worthy of a second yellow card by the referee, and the 19-year-old was sent off.
“This is a learning curve for young players,” Northern Ireland boss O’Neill told the media after the game.
“(Slovenia) are a much more experienced international team than we are. You can see that in the way they managed the situation and played the referee a little bit.
“The emotion in the stadium obviously transferred to the players a little bit, everyone gets a bit frustrated with some of the decisions.
“If you’re booked for dissent, that’s poor. You put yourself under pressure so we have to learn from that.
“We’ve probably seen a little combination of inexperience in a number of players and also just the nature of the emotion when you’re chasing the game against a team that are more experienced.
“That can spill over a bit, but I think that on the night we were pretty disappointed with the performance of the referee.”
Charles will now miss Northern Ireland’s qualifier against Finland next month, as the team looks to improve on a poor qualification campaign in which they have only won two of eight games, both against San Marino.
Leave a Reply