CHRIS BAIRD

You’ve been playing for Northern Ireland for 13 years, so how special is it to finally reach a tournament? We’ve been through tough times but it looks like we’ve turned the corner and left all that behind us. There have been times when we’ve been pretty close to a tournament, but we struggled to back up a big win with another in the next game. Our mentality has changed now, though – we’re unbeaten in 10 games, which isn’t like us at all!

What was it like being banned, so having to watch the match against Greece that clinched qualification? Pretty nervous – I’m not one for watching games. I couldn’t play because of my red card against Hungary – what I call my seven-second head loss [laughs]. It was two tackles in seven seconds: I made one tackle, span around, made another tackle and that was it – the referee went: ‘Yellow, yellow, red, get off!’ He’d played advantage after the first one, but if I’d known I had a yellow card for that, I wouldn’t have made the second one! How do you see your own role at this summer’s tournament? The nine games I played in qualifying were as a defensive midfielder. Whatever the manager decides, I’ll respect, but of course I want to play because I think I deserve it. I’ve been playing throughout my career, I have got 75 caps, and I played nine games out of 10 in the qualifying campaign and did really well.

You’re in the same group as Germany at Euro 2016. How do you view your chances against such a formidable side? They’re the world champions and we have a lot of respect for them. But we’ve got good fixtures to start with – Poland and Ukraine – so if we can get results from them, we might not even need a result against Germany. If we can keep doing the things we have been doing over the last couple of years, we can cause an upset against at least a couple of these teams, and maybe get through to the next round. We’ve got nothing to lose.