Belarus will be Ireland’s final Euro 2016 warm-up opponent

The FAI has confirmed that Belarus will provide the opposition when Ireland play their final warm up game for the European Championships at Turner's Cross on May 31st.

It will be only the third time that the senior team has played a full international in the city and the first occasion on which the two nations have ever met at this level.

Belarus were already lined up to play Northern Ireland the previous Friday in Belfast and the FAI has apparently sought to capitalise on them being on the island as they attempted to line up opponents for a game Martin O’Neill admits he wasn’t sure at first that he really wanted.

“The Dutch game is at the end of May and after that you have 13 or 14 days (in fact it’s 17 days before Ireland’s first game of the tournament),” he says. “I wasn’t overly concerned about that at first but then I looked at it again.”

The capacity at Turner’s Cross will be around 7,000 and details on ticketing have yet to be confirmed.

Belarus are ranked 64 in the world after what was a difficult qualifying campaign. They were in a group with Spain and Slovakia, who Ireland face on Tuesday evening. They actually enjoyed a surprise victory in Zilina last October but won only two other games over the course of the qualifiers, one at home to Luxembourg and one away to Macedonia.