Northern Ireland's Tanya Oxtoby in call for Belfast fast start
Northern Ireland women’s manager Tanya Oxtoby is calling for a fast start tonight towards long-term goals.
Having secured a place in the Women’s Euro 2025 qualifying campaign play-offs with victory in Malta on Friday, Oxtoby now wants success on home soil against Bosnia and Herzegovina in Belfast.
Victory at Windsor Park would confirm second spot in the group and help Northern Ireland sit in contention for a seeded ranking ahead of the first set of play-offs in October.
"We’re looking to start on the front foot and we need to set the tone," said Oxtoby on BBC Sport NI. "We need a bit of control, we’re at home and we don’t want it being very transitional.”
The Australia-born coach is keen to close out the group stages of the campaign progress in style.
"We know the threats they have but we need to nullify them and we need to take our opportunities in the final third," she said. "The pitch is looking amazing and for the final game of the group stage we want to put in a good performance that our fans will be proud of."
She added, in response to positive periods in recent games without a complete display: "I’d love to be able to sit down for 90 minutes!
“We’re aiming for that consistency in performance and I feel like we’re getting there but we want a 90-minute performance."
Training yesterday finished with a full panel of 23 players available for selection but Oxtoby refused to reveal any plans for line-up changes given the brief recovery period between games.
"We’ll see, today was the first time all the players were back out on the pitch so we’ll assess it," she said.
Northern Ireland take on Bosnia and Herzegovina having won two of the five qualifying games to date, with the same number of defeats and a draw completing the tally.
"Where this group started and where we are now, we’ve developed massively," she said. "You can see what we’re trying to do and what we are expecting on and off the pitch and we want to continue that on.
"This is only the beginning.
"We’ve set out for six points (over the two games) in this window, and we want to do it our way and playing our football."