Joely Andrews is aiming high – as high as it’s possible to aim.
Last time out in the Nations League, Northern Ireland survived a scare from Montenegro before holding on to their League B status. This time around, Andrews is looking up rather than down with lofty ambitions.
Promotion to League A where Europe’s top nations play their football is where Northern Ireland want to be and, rather than trying to keep a lid on expectations, Tanya Oxtoby’s players have a determination to meet their latest challenge head-on.
Firstly, that involves starting with a positive result against Women’s Euro 2025-bound Poland in Gdansk on Friday night and, although stung by a 7-0 aggregate Play-Off defeat to Norway that stopped Northern Ireland from joining them in Switzerland in July, the performance, particularly in the second leg in Oslo, has Andrews and Co believing.
“I think League A has to be our aim,” said Andrews.
“We are aiming to be right up there at the top of the group. We are in League B and the ambition is to get out of it.
“That means we have to go and get something in Poland. We are not going to go into any game just to play for the sake of it, we will go to take points.”
At the age of just 22, Andrews is experienced at international level. She is expected to win her 26th cap against the Poles and she is very much favoured by Oxtoby having played in almost all of the 18 games the manager has been in charge for.
Throughout that time, results have, to a very large extent, gone as expected. The team higher up the rankings table generally wins out in women’s international football.
Andrews, who scored against the double-header’s second opponents Bosnia and Herzegovina in last July’s Euro qualifier, is taking confidence from previous games as the belief that Northern Ireland are edging closer to the League A standard nations and getting results against teams who, on paper at least, are better.
“I don’t think we can ever be satisfied when you lose a game and you don’t qualify, but I think in terms of the process, we were more satisfied after the second game against Norway than we were the first, and in the long run, that game will stand us in good stead,” said the midfielder, who moved from Glentoran Women to Hearts Women in July 2024.
“We weren’t satisfied with the result, but the process was definitely in the right direction.
“When you play top teams like Norway, even if the result doesn’t go your way, there is a lot of learning that you can take from it, and that was definitely the case with us.
“The performance that we put in in the second leg, we can do that the first time that we play Poland. That is the standard.
“We have set the bar – obviously the result didn’t go our way – of the way we need to play the game, so we are going in with that standard of performance as our bar.”
Oxtoby has turned to two players at the opposite ends of the scale in terms of their international careers to cover for two injury absences – Cliftonville Ladies’ Kelsie Burrows and Kerry Beattie, who was due to become the first Aberdeen Women player to win a senior international cap.
They have been replaced by Nadene Caldwell, who is now in line to win her 88th cap in Gdansk after being called up from the standby list having missed both the Euro Play-Off Semi-Final win over Croatia and Final defeat to Norway through injury, and she is joined by her Glentoran Women team-mate Kascie Weir, who has been promoted from the Under-19 squad.
Oxtoby has also added former England international duo Laura Bassett and Izzy Christiansen to her coaching team.