Permutations How Northern Ireland can reach round of 16

They will be guaranteed first place in Group C if Poland fail to beat Ukraine, which would set up a meeting in Lille a week today against the third-placed team from Group A, B or F. If Poland win and Northern Ireland come runnersup, they will play the runners-up of Group A in St-Etienne on Saturday. Four points would probably be enough to take them into the round of 16 as one of the four third-place qualifiers with England or France possible opponents.

Defeat Qualification is still possible even if they lose to Germany because they are guaranteed at least third place ahead of Ukraine. Bingham inherited a squad in 1980 in need of discipline and direction, much as O’Neill did in 2011, 25 years and counting since the country’s last experience of a leading international competition. Nicholl is the link and sees clear parallels.

“When I first started playing for Northern Ireland, Danny Blanchflower was the manager and we won games we should have lost and lost games we should have won,” he said. “You didn’t know what you were getting.

“Then Billy Bingham came in and there was discipline on and off the field. It’d be bed at 11pm. You weren’t away playing cards at two or three in the morning. There was milk and orange juice on the table, no more coke or lemonade. You rebelled against it a bit because you felt you were being treated like kids. Then you get a result and you think, ‘I don’t mind this.’ “Whether you were playing West Germany or Albania, you still had that same underdog feeling that you seized upon.

“I liked to overlap as a full-back but against Germany, Billy said to me, ‘Jimmy, you’ll not be overlapping tonight.’ I said, ‘You’re joking’ and he said, ‘No, I’m not’. Michael has that discipline. He says, ‘This is what’s required to win, and this is the team that’s required to do it’.

“Some players might not like it but Michael knows.”

There was no better example of that than in the 2-0 win over Ukraine in Lyon on Thursday, when O’Neill made five changes to the team that disappointed in losing 1-0 to Poland in Nice four days earlier, including dropping star striker Kyle Lafferty, and switched from 5-3-2 to 4-3-3.

The improvement was incredible, to the point where forward Josh Magennis claimed yesterday that Jose Mourinho or Roy Hodgson would have been “hailed as magicians” had they done something similar in a game.

“We had sat and discussed it for a couple of days,” Nicholl said. “In my experience there’s a certain tone that can suddenly be struck and, bang, the manager will say, ‘I’m going to play him and him in that way’ and once he says it like that, it’s done.

“I thought, ‘That’s it, I can hear it in your voice, you believe in that, stick with it.’ It was emphatic decisionmaking but that’s what I like. You’ve got to have total conviction in the team you want to play.”

Ian Stewart scored the winner against Germany in 1982. Perhaps another QPR striker, Conor Washington, will be the hero this time around. Nicholl, though, will just settle for any happy ending. C of tournament’s expansion ristiano Ronaldo was right about one thing. When he had his postmatch hissy fit following Portugal’s less-thanseismic first engagement in the Euros last week, the Real Madrid forward sneered that Iceland “is a small country”. Indeed, it is. In fact, in terms of number of inhabitants, it is the smallest ever to participate in the finals, the 11 players in the starting line-up representing approximately 0.0032 per cent of its entire population. Which made the 1-1 draw achieved against a country of Portugal’s footballing tradition all the more admirable. Far from behaving small, as Ronaldo sneeringly suggested, the Icelanders were thinking big.

And they are far from alone. So far, this has been the tournament of the little guy punching way above his weight. Northern Ireland, with fewer than 50 professional footballers to call upon, inflicted defeat on Ukraine; Wales outwitted Slovakia; Albania held out against France almost to the last. None of the less-renowned nations have been cast in the manner expected by those who have criticised the expansion of the tournament: as the fall guys, here simply to beef up the goal difference of the established nations. Indeed, the only team to have been thrashed is Turkey, a country who, as Leave campaigners are quick to point out, has a population of some 75 million from which to choose its 11 footballing representatives.

Iceland’s stoic draw and those pulsating victories by Northern Ireland and Wales have demonstrated that the smaller countries are not in France simply to make up the numbers, enjoy the craic and go home at the end of the group stage clutching their souvenir Camembert. They sense they could achieve something historic.

When asked by an English journalist why the playing field seems to have levelled, Gianni De Biasi, the coach of Albania dropped the ‘L’ word.

“If you come from the English Premier League, you have a great example in Leicester City,” he said. “Football is becoming more tactical, what makes the difference is desire, organisation, players who get on well and are compatible. It’s more difficult when you don’t have so much time together to try to develop as a team, but perhaps, for the smaller countries, it is easier to create that spirit.”

You imagine the example of Claudio Ranieri’s Leicester has been a common one in team talks in France. Both as an French side, for instance, many times before, so are not intimidated by reputation. The Welsh and Northern Irish squads, too, have experience of the cosmopolitan Premier League.

As much as the romantic might wish to see ultimate success for one of the outsiders, there is one substantial blockage for the smaller nations. If anyone is to emulate Leicester – or, more pertinently, Greece and Denmark, who against all assumptions won this competition – they will require the established sides to suffer meltdowns in the manner of that which enabled Ranieri’s side to exploit their Premier League moment. And, thus far, there is little evidence that Italy, France or Germany are on the verge of implosion. Not to mention Spain, the holders, who have shown very little capacity for self-destruction.

Organisation is crucial – all the sides here are drilled in the art of squeezing space and keeping shape