Horgan is hoping for his chance
FAILURE to qualify for the World Cup was a hammer blow to the Irish squad but Daryl Horgan will draw on the positives of missing out.
With nothing but a passing interest in this summer’s extravaganza, Martin O’neill has scheduled a year of friendlies on top of Nations League encounters.
That gives fringe players like Horgan the chance to impress as he knows it would have been a closed shop until after the summer had Ireland qualified for Russia.
Preston and former Dundalk winger Horgan said: “It was quite a settled squad for the last year and you just tried to impress and do the best you can.
“But now that the campaign has ended you’re hoping that with a couple of lads leaving you might get a chance.
“But there are a few new faces coming in as well so you just have to do as well as you can. It’s a bedding in period for a lot of lads.
“There were a lot of new faces in Turkey it was always going to be a difficult game. It didn’t go as well as we’d have liked and on another day we might have been luckier.”
Winning his third cap, Horgan has had to bide his time since breaking through and appreciates he has to walk before he can run. But he injected life off the bench in his 15-minute cameo in Antalya as Ireland chased an equaliser.
“I’m not playing for Preston, so I don’t really have a leg to stand on,” said the Galway man. “It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just one of those things.
“I’d like to think that the manager (at Preston, Alex Neil) will pick me but that’s the way it is. That’s football, sometimes it goes well for you and sometimes it doesn’t. I just have to keep working and hopefully play my way into contention in the last nine games of our season.”