📰 Newspapers

Hallgrimsson rues 'painful' defeat for Republic of Ireland

Hallgrimsson rues 'painful' defeat for Republic of Ireland

Republic of Ireland boss Heimir Hallgrimsson says their 1-0 defeat by Austria in their penultimate Nations League game was "painful".

Substitute Sasa Kalajdzic poked home the winner in Linz, with the narrow victory ensuring Austria claimed top spot and automatic promotion to League A.

Chiedozie Ogbene squandered a late chance to equalise for the Republic and Hallgrimsson was frustrated they left the Raiffeisen Arena empty-handed when they had chances to secure the win which would have kept their hopes of winning the group alive.

"It was painful not to get anything from this match. I think we deserved at least a draw, but we needed the win for this game to count," he told RTE.

"I think we had the chances, the openings and the positions to do that, but this was not our day in goalscoring, so it is disappointing.

"Everything that we asked the players to do, they did and I think they gave everything.

"For that reason, we should be happy in a way but, obviously, we don't want to be building something, we want to win games."

Austria seal top spot with win over Republic of Ireland

Saturday's defeat left Hallgrimsson's side third in Group B3, a point behind Kosovo, who they face in their final game in Dublin on Tuesday.

In brief

Republic of Ireland boss Heimir Hallgrimsson says their 1-0 defeat by Austria in their penultimate Nations League game was "painful". Substitute Sasa Kalajdzic poked home the winner in Linz, with the narrow victory ensuring Austria claimed top spot and automatic promotion to League A. Austria seal top spot with win over Republic of Ireland Saturday's defeat left Hallgrimsson's side third in Group B3, a point behind Kosovo, who they face in their final game in Dublin on Tuesday.

This is the opening of the story, shared with credit to BBC Sport. The rest of the report — with every detail — continues on the publisher’s website.

Continue reading at BBC Sport ↗

Cookie settings

Choose which cookies we may use. You can change this at any time from Cookie settings in the footer. Details of each cookie are in the Cookie Policy.

Strictly necessary

Needed for sign-in, security, payments and remembering these choices. Always on.

Preferences

Remember settings such as dark mode.

Analytics & performance

Help us count visits, understand which pages, devices and countries our readers use, and measure how well the site performs – anonymous and aggregated.

Advertising & marketing

Lets advertising partners show and personalise adverts, measure impressions, clicks and visits, prevent ad fraud and pay us – this is how the free site is funded.

🔔 News notifications

Get headlines from NewsHub on this device — even when the site is closed.

You can switch this off at any time. Works on Android, Windows, Mac and Linux browsers; on iPhone/iPad add the site to your Home Screen first.