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JAMES MCCLEAN FEELS the Irish team have been subjected to unfair media criticism in the wake of recent wins over Georgia and Moldova.

McClean felt the media needed a “reality check” after not everyone was overly impressed with victories against the teams ranked 137th and 161st in the world respectively.

“We got a lot of flak after the Serbia and Georgia games,” he told Sky Sports. “I think unfairly so as well.

“The Irish press especially, they need a bit of a reality check. We’re not going to blow teams away. We’ve always been a team that works hard.

“So we’re happy to get a win tonight and happy to be on seven points.

It’s a no-win situation. If we play pretty football and we don’t win, we should have won. If we don’t play football and we win, we need to play better football.”

Things got a little heated towards the end of the match, with McClean among other Irish players clearly annoyed by the Moldovans’ tough tackling.

We were 3-1 up and for some reason, they decided they wanted to kick lumps out of us then. A few of the tackles were out of order. Luckily, we’ve seen most of them coming, because if we didn’t, there could have been some serious injuries.

“It got a bit heated and it was probably a bit stupid from myself and a few of us to get involved because we were winning the game, but that’s football, emotions are high.”

h/t Balls.ie

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