Martin O’Neill: ‘Robbie was out cold for a while’

Robbie Brady is almost certain to miss Sunday's game in Moldova with manager Martin O'Neill confirming that the Dubliner was "out cold" 10 minutes from the end of the game at the Aviva following a clash of heads with Georgia defender Soloman Kvirkvelia.

“Robbie was taken off and he was out cold for a while,” said O’Neill. “He’s come back around and the doctors are quite pleased with him. Naturally I’m hoping that the lad will be fine because he’s as brave as a lion. He’s a fine player and he started to get into it in the second half there tonight.

“He was concussed,” he continued before being asked whether that meant that the related protocols would ensure that he cannot be involved in Chisinau. “I have to check that,” he said “but I would say that you are probably right.”

O'Neill described the booking that Jeff Hendrick picked up after that as "harsh" but the Burnley midfielder too will be absent at the weekend. Shane Long went off before the end with a muscle injury, meanwhile, but the manager suggested that he should be fit for Sunday's game.

Ireland go into that with four points after a winning here despite a terribly poor first-half performance, something that the manager suggested was primarily down to a lack of application.

“Sometimes you have to put on a pair of overalls and get at it,” he said. “I thought we were very, very ordinary in the first half. We couldn’t get close enough to them at all. Particularly here in the Aviva we needed to get on the front foot but we couldn’t get any momentum going.

“We just didn’t get close enough, it was simple as that in the first 45 minutes. You think that after maybe five or 10 minutes we’re going to start getting into it but it didn’t happen. We just didn’t work hard enough.

“Obviously if you have the ball you have to try to use it well but we didn’t have to the ball enough In the second half we started to try to close them down, just to do some ugly work and we got more into the game but we didn’t play well enough.

“I was pleased at half-time to be level because they’d had one off the bar and were controlling the game but in the second half we were a little bit better, we started to put some pressure on them and obviously we’re delighted to have got the win.

“The three points became the most important things for us,” he continued. “That’s three times that we’ve played Georgia and I have to say that they’ve been really tough games for us. I think they’ll be going away thinking that they played well against Austria as well and they’ll be wondering how they’ve gone away with no points.”

Towards the end of the press conference he was asked about rumours on social media that Harry Arter might have decided to declare for England and he said that he had heard nothing of them.

“That’s news to me,” he said, “but obviously he hasn’t played a competitive game. The choice is very much with the player.”

His opposite number, meanwhile, was, just as O’Neill suspected, a little bit bewildered by how his side could be going home with no points on the board.

"When you don't score a goal you can't take the point," said Vladimir Weiss. "We showed good quality in the first half, we had three goals chances, we played well in the middle. Valerian Gvilia, it was his first time in the national team but I thought he did well and I hope that in the future we can do better and better, because we have played well against Austria, we have played well against Ireland but we have no points."