Ward gutted at concession of goal to Scotland

It was a match full of running battles – and Stephen Ward wasn’t one bit surprised.

The Ireland full back insists he expected to be exactly like that, but says both himself and his fellow defenders are raging about the manner in which Ireland conceded.

Shaun Maloney was allowed to take a short corner and after a neat one-two with Scott Brown, the Malaysian born winger curled a beautiful effort past David Forde.

Ward was gutted with it because of how Ireland pride themselves on defending.

He said: “People spoke about it being a bit like a derby game and it felt like it. There probably wasn’t a lot of quality in the game but it was a real battle, both teams gave it everything but we’re really disappointed to lose it the way we have.

“We felt we were well in it and should be going back to Ireland with a point. We’ve defended really well for most of the game and they’ve had one bit of quality that beat us but from our point of view it’s a really disappointing goal to give away from a set piece because we pride ourselves in defending well but we switched off at that.”

Despite the defeat, Ward has no doubts that the two teams are evenly matched and is already looking forward to the return match in Dublin next year, one of four home matches for Ireland out of the next five, something that Ward insists his side must take advantage of.

He said: “It’s going to be really tight to get out of the group. Obviously we’ve had three tough away games out of the four and I think our home form is going to determine how we do. I think three or four of the next five are at home so we have to look to that now but at the minute it hurts that we came here and didn’t get a result because I felt we were right in it, especially in the second half.”