EURO 2024 Qualifier GROUP B

I'd agree with pretty much all of the three posts above - its improbable, but possible and we need to just get behind the team and hope we can be competitive in the group. Tough opening couple of fixtures doesnt help much, but at least they are spread across 2 windows. It's not impossible that we will be welcoming the World Cup winners to Lansdowne on 27th March and we then have to go to Greece two or three weeks after the end of the season in mid June. I'd be content with 2 or 3 pts from those 2 games, zero points which is entirely possible and we will face an uphill battle.

Some good flights to and from Malaga available with Ryanair for c. €100 if anyone is thinking Gibraltar

I don’t think anyone here has ever said they won’t back the team so that’s a given.

As much as we want to try and give ourselves a chance it’s a long time since we have been this despondent before a ball has been kicked as things look grim allied to the fact of our poor nations league showing means a playoff via this route is in the lap of the gods.

what we need now more than anything is luck.

We are really looking at the possibility of going at least 12 years without being at a major championships!!

We out performed our seeding was 2001 and we need something similar here.  

Hopefully France will beat the Dutch in the first game and we nick a point or a win in Dublin against the French.  France will qualify in my view so I hope the Dutch are a shambles under Koeman and France take them to the cleaners and are cocky coming to Dublin. 

I'll try and put a more positive spin on it - basically, I think we need to take a minimum of 5 pts over our first three fixtures to stand a chance of automatic qualification. On the plus side, we get to throw all our resources at the French game with only one game in the opening March window and France have to play Netherlands three days previously. How we choose to prepare for that game will be interesting, do we really want to play a friendly 3 days previously? If so, it should be against the weakest opposition possible imo in preparation for the Gibralter home game in June where we may need to utilise the full squad (see hereunder)

Similarly, we get to throw all our resources at the opening game in the June window Greece (A), given that we can surely beat Gibralter at home 3 days later. It's going to be a tense game probably played in high humidity and both Greece and ourselves will recognise the significance of the fixture. We will then likely need to utilise the squad for the Gibralter game given the likely humidity and the three day turnaround, but we can surely beat a Gibralter team likely to be on 0pts from 3 games at that stage (if theyre not on 0pts, that will be good for us also).

In a general sense, I think the fact that France, Netherlands and Greece are all practically guaranteed a play-off should they fail to qualify automatically is another minor positive.

If Amsterdam, we will get around 3,000 tickets. For the Slovakia play off we had 2,500 tickets I think and cut off was 2 aways so could be something similar. It being a Saturday will boost demand though