Ben Symes

I'm trying the 88 minutes and it's a brilliant clip where

If you're watching the game and when you're so caught up in the game, you see a team when they're pending 11 men behind the ball and you think, God, they're really under the cosh here.

But then when you watch the clip, we are so in control of what's happening, despite the fact that Portugal have the ball on the edge of the box.

And every time someone tries to make a run to find a bit of space, an Ireland player is there and stops it.

And a lot of the time it was James Coleman.

Stops kind of the space and eventually it's forced out to Rafaleo and he ends up running out of play under pressure, which was like Benet.

And, yeah, look, Hamer basically wants to lay out, these are the principles how we want to play.

And you hear so much from him and the staff in the Ireland camp saying how much we've improved.

Sometimes you kind of go, look, they're always going to say that.

They're never going to say we're aggressing.

Hamer is quite honest.

So, you know, if we were seriously aggressing, he probably would admit to it.

But he basically just pulled up a load of metrics.

of where we were at the start when he took over and where we are now based on other teams around Europe.

And they were all basically on those key six points that I know he had laid out to a couple of journalists about 18 months ago.

He was basically just refreshing people to say, this is what I told you, this is where we were then, and this is where we are now, and we have improved under every single metric.

And one of the things brought up was that Czechia game and how statistically they are...

I think they're in the top three teams in Europe for aerial duels, duels on the ground and set pieces.

We actually outmatched them on them.

And it was something that I think we were quite worried going into that game.