Michael O’Neill insists it will be 'dead easy' to combine Stoke City job with Northern Ireland's Euro 2020 play-offs

Michael O’Neill has hit back at the critics who claim he cannot “double up” by insisting it will be “dead easy” to prepare Northern Ireland for the Euro 2020 play-offs in March - and still manage Stoke City.

Northern Ireland - who face Germany in Frankfurt in their final Group C qualifier on Tuesday - will discover who they face in the play-offs when the draw is made in Bucharest on Friday.

The situation has been complicated by O’Neill’s appointment as Stoke manager but he is adamant he can juggle both jobs and claims the worst thing for the Irish Football Association would be to parachute a replacement in at short notice.  Stephen Robinson, the Motherwell manager and former Northern Ireland midfielder, is a long contender to succeed O’Neill.

“Dead easy, we’re going to turn up on a Sunday and play on a Thursday. I can pick my squad now, I could name it tomorrow,” a defiant O’Neill said when asked if he had thought yet about how he would combine the two roles

“(Researching our opponents) - that’s not a problem. Our opponents don’t play between now and then, they’ve already played.

“We’re not going to watch individual players play for their clubs, so the work we have on the opponents, we’ll have that well in advance.

“In this job, I could watch 40 games or two games and 99 per cent of the time, my squad will be pretty much the same, so people are making a lot out of this situation, which doesn’t exist.  There’s nobody better than me to judge this because I actually do the job.

“To put a coach in with a play-off situation, with three days’ preparation, wouldn’t be fair to the players or the Association because of what’s at stake. And it wouldn’t be fair to the coach to go and prepare.

“We know our team, we know our best team. We have one or two players to come back in - Conor Washington and Jordan Jones - but the squad picks itself other than that.”