Michael O’Neill talks about their draw against Blackburn

Manager

Michael O’Neill

thinks that they earned an important point in the night that they had one of their players sent off.

“There’s a sense of disappointment because we were so dominant but when the game turns on its head, it’s important you take something from it so I think we showed good character to do that because it would have been easy not to be able to show that resilience to take something from the game. The important thing for me was the level of performance was good. We freshened the team up, brought some young players in on loan. They helped us.”

O’Neill said

.

“We’re constantly trying to evolve the team and I felt for 70 minutes we showed that. We looked a very good team. We just have to continue to work and improve. We want to continue to push and challenge to be in the play-off, and today when we look back, we’d probably say it was a point gained.

“Having been so dominant, it would have been harsh on us not to take something from the game.”

Here is what

Tony Mowbray

said about his side’s performance against Stoke:

“We’re disappointed with the nature of the goal we lost, of course. Their biggest threat came from set plays all day.

“We didn’t look like we could score for 70 minutes. I thought we needed more energy in the team. That’s the balance I’ve talked about of (Bradley) Dack and (Lewis) Travis coming back from long-term injuries.

“It’s a call we have to make of whether we’re going to get them fit by playing games or leave them out and they get 20 minutes, half an hour. I thought the team was off its intensity levels that we normally play at.

“And yet we played against a decent side with very experienced footballers who have played at the top level. We huffed and puffed, got a goal, ended up playing the last 15 minutes against 10 men which didn’t necessarily help us, I don’t think, other than it took their threat of trying to score a goal away.

“But we didn’t really look like we were going to get a winner. We had plenty of stuff around the edge of their box without peppering their goal. I think that’s their experience.”

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