Teams are in for difficult game in Belfast says Northern Ireland’s Craig Cathcart

Thursday night’s 2-0 victory over Estonia in their opening group game paves the way for tomorrow’s second pool game against Belarus at Windsor.

And Watford defender Cathcart wants teams to be scared to come to Belfast and he knows the NI players will cope with the pressure this will bring.

“We are going into games expecting to win. Other teams look at us in a different way, too.

“They know they are in for a difficult game when they come to Windsor and that is a different type of pressure now.

“But the lads showed how prepared we were and we managed to deal with any pressure to produce a good performance and result.

And Cathcart was pleased with the way they played against Estonia with Niall McGinn and Steve Davis getting the goals in a 2-0 victory.

“It felt similar to most of the performances in the Nations League, we were very controlled in most of the games we played and the result showed that tonight.

“But we didn’t get the rub of the green in the Nations League but the result on Thursday night was really well deserved.

“We probably could have had another couple of goals on the back of it.

“We knew we were playing well.

“We’d spoken about it with Michael and the staff but we just weren’t taking our chances and nothing was going our way.

“But this time everything went our way. Even at 1-0 Bailey Peacock-Farrell had to make a save and he’s done a great job there and we quickly scored the second goal and saw the game out.

“At 1-1 it could have been a very different game and you never really know how it could turn out from there because they would have got their heads up but it was a great save from Bailey and we saw it out.”

And Cathcart admits it is good for Michael O’Neill’s side that they are creating chances and taking them.

“It’s brilliant that we are creating a lot of chances. During the Nations League, especially in the home games we did the same. I can’t remember how many shots we had against Bosnia but it was a lot and we kept talking about if we keep creating chances we will score goals.

“We should have had more than two on against Estonia but it was a great way to start to the campaign; two goals, a clean sheets and three points.

“Even when Paddy McNair missed his chance, we didn’t panic. We hadn’t created as many chances as we would have liked in the first half but we spoke about it at half-time and said we just had to keep grinding them down because the first goal would change the game.

“That’s exactly what we did and we were confident from there. Hopefully Sunday will be more of the same.”