Michael O’Neill maintains he looks deeper than results and Northern Ireland’s performance against Belarus gave him plenty of encouragement.
The manager and players felt it was a missed opportunity after several first-half chances were missed, but O’Neill refused to be downbeat after the scoreless draw in Zalaegerszeg.
O’Neill’s side had two goals ruled out and hit the post, all in the first-half, but could not find the goal that would have sent them top of Nations League Group C3 as their familiar lack of cutting edge proved costly.
But the former Stoke City boss, who handed debuts to goalkeeper Pierce Charles and striker Lee Bonis, returned from Hungary with plenty of optimism ahead of Tuesday’s home clash with Bulgaria.
“I’m pleased with a lot of things, there are more positives to take from the game,” explained O’Neill.
“It was an excellent first-half performance, and clearly, we should have scored on more than one occasion, but we didn’t manage to do that.
“It was a combination of our own finishing and they had a little bit of luck. Their goalkeeper made some good saves.
“The second-half was never going to follow the same pattern, however, we did create some good opportunities.
“We had two or three good chances and didn’t really look like we were going to concede a goal.
“We got a clean sheet, but we must realise when you are on top, it is important to get ahead, and the second-half would have been different in terms of how they approached it, they were happy to get a 0-0 and you could see that in their reaction after the game.
“We must produce a similar level of performance on Tuesday.
“A home win would give us seven points and put us above Bulgaria, and whether we are top of the group or not, the most important thing is to keep progressing as a team.
“People will focus on the result, but I look deeper than that and will take positives.”
Teenage goalkeeper Charles enjoyed a quiet night on his debut as he and midfielder Shea became the 23rd set of brothers to play for Northern Ireland or Ireland.
“I thought Pierce was excellent and gave us a lot of assurance. He has great distribution, but more than that, he gave composure and belief to a back-three,” said O’Neill.
“You could see that in how we built our game from the back.
“He has huge potential, we have seen that from Shea and now Pierce, and we are delighted to have the two of them.”
With 15 minutes to go, ADO Den Haag frontman and former Larne and Portadown ace Bonis savoured his first cap.
“Lee had shown up well during the week, and the way the game was, we thought we could get someone in behind and he got the nod over Josh (Magennis) in that situation,” added O’Neill.
“He’s a player who is new to international football and is a little raw, but he has attributes that I think can help us.”
As this young Northern Ireland team continues to develop, O’Neill sees long-term progress even if the results are not always there in the short term.
“We’ve worked very hard, we’ve been consistent with the system of play, we’ve been consistent with how we build the game with the back-three, how we try and work patterns of play with two 10s behind a solitary striker,” O’Neill said.
“We’ve got speed on the sides with Jamal (Lewis) and Conor. At the minute, we probably function a bit better on the right than on the left, so there’s work to be done.
“But what we did well was when the ball turned over, we got around the ball, we competed well against more experienced, older players. Shea was very good out of possession, him and George (Saville) won a lot of ball back.
“Overall, that’s the type of team we want to be. We want to play with speed but play with composure as well, so we’ll take a lot of positives from how we played, although obviously, we’re disappointed we didn’t score.”