Jim Crawford says Ireland’s hopes of making next year’s European Championships will rest on eliminating the “silly mistakes” that cost them any hope of securing automatic qualification.
Individual errors proved costly during Tuesday evening's 4-1 defeat to Italy in Ascoli, in a game Ireland needed to win to clinch top spot.
Under-21 boss Crawford said: “If you make silly mistakes and you concede goals in the manner that we did, you’ll get punished by teams like this.
“That Italy team will be competing to win the European Championships. We always knew it would be a challenging game.
“What we take out of it as a group of players and a staff is we certainly have to tighten up, particularly on the turnover in possession, plus eradicate those silly mistakes we made time and again during the game.”
Ireland will get a second chance at qualification when they take part in the two-legged play-offs in September.
The draw, which is unseeded, will take place next Tuesday and Ireland’s opponents will be Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Iceland, Israel, Slovakia or Ukraine.
Crawford continued: “The message to [the players] is this is the level we need to get to. It was always going to be a challenging game against Italy, but that’s the level.
“If you go into the finals next June, that’s in and around the same level of team you’ll be playing against.
“We’ve got to learn from it. But it’s an amazing achievement to get a play-off place, to be two games away from a place in the European Championships.”
Full-back Lee O’Connor is confident that Ireland can bounce back from Tuesday’s defeat.
“It was a tough day, we weren’t ourselves, we didn’t give a good account of ourselves,” he said.
“It is going to sting, it’s going to hurt for quite a while, but we still have a play off, so we have to dust ourselves down and come back in September.
“The heat was obviously different for a lot of us, but I don’t think you can say it had anything to do with the result.
“I don’t think we were at it, we weren’t good enough for whatever reason, maybe just an off-day, a couple of individual mistakes.
“But I think you saw from the rest of the qualifying campaign that that wasn’t us. We’ll get it right come September.”
Midfielder Gavin Kilkenny added: “Obviously we were very disappointed with the result, because we know we are a lot better than that.
“But we can’t forget that it’s an unbelievable achievement to get to the play-offs, so we are happy with that.
“If we cut out a few sloppy errors we probably could have done a lot better there. But we weren’t good enough on the day and we didn’t deserve to win.
“We need to learn from our mistakes and hopefully put them right in September, get through the play offs and make history, like we intended.”
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