NI boss O'Neill starts massive week in right manner

For most Championship players and managers, the forthcoming international break is a welcome chance to refresh and regroup after the gruelling winter slog.

But not Michael O'Neill.

He has to change hats almost immediately from his job of trying to keep Blackburn Rovers up to attempting to lead Northern Ireland to their first World Cup in 30 years.

For the last six weeks, his focus has been club football. Now it switches to a mammoth occasion as Northern Ireland travel to Italy for their play-off semi-final on Thursday night.

Both are huge jobs in their own right, but masterminding success in Bergamo would be up there with his finest achievements.

There is a strong Northern Irish flavour at Ewood Park with Steven Davis and Damien Johnson on O'Neill's coaching staff, but one thing the 56-year-old has shown again in his short time in east Lancashire is that he knows how to make the most of his resources.

Without a number of key players owing to injury, O'Neill has coaxed 11 points out of eight games.

That has been enough to lead Rovers from 22nd - and in the relegation zone - when he arrived to their current position of 19th with a useful cushion of four points above the bottom three.

Members of the Green and White Army can also be encouraged by Blackburn's last two results, a come-from-behind win at Millwall and then a battling goalless draw with Middlesbrough.

Those two sides are both going for automatic promotion but O'Neill's players dug deep for their boss, showing resilience to keep going to gain a positive result.

"I've only had eight games, but it does feel like more than that," he told BBC Sport.

"It was important for me that we took something from the game today and went into the international break without the hangover of a defeat.

"We had two games in Portsmouth and Oxford where we only took one point, but the reaction to doing that has been really positive. That is commendable from the players and the staff."

It is those qualities that Northern Ireland will need in spades if they are to upset the Italians, four-time World Cup winners no less, on their own turf and set up a match with the winners of either Wales or Bosnia and Herzegovina on 31 March.

O'Neill's team has done it before and he will repeat that message when the squad convenes ahead of their Italian job.

"I'll reset tomorrow and the players will come in and hopefully they'll come through their games unscathed," he said.

"It's a massive game for us on Thursday, but it's a brilliant game for us because the expectation and the pressure is all on the opposition. Hopefully we can give a performance similar to what my boys gave today."

If O'Neill returns to Blackburn with a World Cup appearance on the horizon in June, he really will have achieved something special.