Ireland Men’s Under-19s Head Coach Tom Mohan has praised his team after narrowly losing to world champions Germany in the final game of the Elite Phase qualifiers.

The young Irish team went down 1-0 to host nation Germany with Stuttgart’s Maximilian Herwerth heading what proved to be the winner after five minutes.

Ireland had the better of the chances throughout the game recording 12 attempts to Germany’s nine.

But the defeat concluded the end of the Elite Phase qualification which saw a 1-1 draw against Slovenia and a 3-0 defeat to Finland.

Speaking after the qualifiers, Mohan had nothing but praise for his team: “We competed in every game but ultimately it came down to chances that were taken by the opposition. We had a few moments where we could have scored, hitting the posts or a ball just not quite right for a tap in, these are the fine margins.

“Germany were always going to be difficult. The boys were brilliant they created a lot of chances and more than the Germans did. From a performance point of view I couldn’t have asked much more from the players.

“We’ve had 12 games this year and was going into the Elite Phase with one defeat in nine games and that defeat was by one goal to France. We’d scored plenty of goals, had great confidence but it was one of those set of qualifiers where we created plenty of chances and couldn’t convert and that’s the hard learnings of elite level football.

“To sum-up the season, and looking at the bigger picture, as the season has gone on they’ve grown. Especially in the last week we had so many really good individual performances and they showed great football intelligence to not only adapt to different systems the opposition played but our own different systems.

“They’re good group of lads, great attitude and desire. I’d like to thank them for their efforts for the season and hopefully now they can push on in senior football. I’d also like to thank my staff. They’ve been fantastic in the last week and throughout the season and they’re a credit to our team and Irish football.”             

Ireland: Dike, Babb, Turley (C), McCarthy, O’Sullivan, Morley (Dillon, 71’), Devaney (Moore, 62’), Akachukwu, Razi (Orazi, 70’), M.Noonan (Okosun, 71’), Ochoa-Moloney (Kone-Doherty, 87’)

Germany: Heide, Reich, Odogu, Decker, Herweth, Kritzer, Darvich, Onos, El Mala (Brunner, 59’), Malanga, Ramsak

Referee: Henrik Nalbandyan (Armenia)

UEFA European Under-19 Championship Elite Round Qualifiers
Wednesday, March 19 | Finland 3-0 Ireland
Saturday, March 22 | Ireland 1-1 Slovenia
Tuesday, March 25 | Ireland 0-1 Germany