CHIEDOZIE OGBENE believes Ireland should take encouragement from Monday night’s narrow 1-0 loss to France, but believes they must maintain that level of performance ahead of the crucial June qualifiers.

Ireland travel to face Greece in Athens on 16 June before hosting Gibraltar at home three days later.

The Greece match especially will likely be significant in determining Ireland’s fate. In a five-team group that includes sides of the calibre of France and Netherlands, anything less than three points against Gus Poyet’s side would likely leave Ireland already facing a significant uphill task when it comes to Euro 2024 qualification.

And after this week’s setback, Rotherham star Ogbene says the squad are very much cognisant of the urgent need to pick up wins in the forthcoming group games.

“Well, I’m sure Holland were shocked by France’s performance in the first half, and by watching that game we knew we couldn’t make the same mistakes.

“But yeah, we have to be confident. We have to go into the Holland games and try to win.

“Most importantly, the two games coming up in June, we have to get the six points from those games and that’s the expectation we have of ourselves, but we need to be consistent.

“And it’s going to be difficult obviously, but that’s something we’re striving towards.”

While it did not yield the desired result, Ogbene feels Ireland can take encouragement from the manner of the performance against France on Monday and that it should serve as a benchmark going forward.

“Well, that’s the standard we set ourselves to go out and perform like that every game. That’s the expectation now we have of ourselves.

“As [assistant coach] John O’Shea said: ‘That’s the level now, that’s the bar that we’ve set.’

“And hopefully we can, it’s going to be difficult, different teams pose different threats, we had a game plan that we tried to stop them from getting total control of the game and I think when we go and play Greece away it might be different, a different game plan, we don’t know who is going to be involved in that game plan.

“But I can see in everyone’s eyes that everyone’s hungry, some good players missed out tonight. Troy Parrott missed out on the squad tonight and he’s a fantastic player but he understands that we all have a role, that we’re all given a role to do in this team.

“I can see how hungry the boys are. We have a really young squad but no excuses, I think, the boys want to start winning now and we want to do it now.

“I think overall you have to look at the positives [from the France game] but we are disappointed, we don’t want to celebrate losses and we don’t want to celebrate good performances, we want to celebrate results. And that’s what we want to do. We are disappointed not to get a point at least.”

He continued: “You’re asking a young team to beat France and to compete against the best in the world so soon and from our history, we haven’t been the best nation.

“So it’s a process and we’re trying to change, we’re trying to slowly build into a winning mentality and that’s not going to happen overnight.

“We put up performances against big teams but it’s very difficult for us to match these nations that have gone to the World Cup and we’re trying to get to that destination.

“So it will take time. We know we all want it today and I want it today but hopefully sooner rather than later we can get it to go in the right way.”

Of his own player-of-the-match-winning performance, in which he helped keep one of the best players in the world, Kylian Mbappe, quiet, Ogbene added: “I had a role to protect the defenders, especially with the speed of Mbappe, to try to cause problems up the pitch and that’s what I tried to do. I think the trust the manager has in me, to leave me with that role, it’s a privilege to be where I am really.

“I want to highlight the performance of Evan Ferguson, an 18-year-old holding up the ball against world-class centre-backs, was outstanding today — he allowed me to get into the game.

“I think for the majority of the time that France had possession, we were solid and compact. I think we were hard to break down. A long-range shot beat us.”