While Northern Ireland’s skipper on the night, and their most capped player of all time, Steven Davis remembers a performance where “not very much of it was good”, the odds of an unlikely upset had lengthened further when Martin Paterson fired the visitors into a 14th-minute lead.
Aurelien Joachim cancelled out that goal before half-time however and Stefano Bensi put Luxembourg, who had previously won only four World Cup qualifiers, into a shock lead.
Gareth McAuley appeared to salvage a face-saving draw with a late header, but Mathias Janisch struck three minutes from time to leave O’Neill reflecting on an “unacceptable” performance.
The manager went on to call his side’s game management “pathetic”, while local newspapers were even less kind, labelling the result against the part-timers ranked 140th in the world as the worst in the country’s history.
And yet, nine of O’Neill’s starting XI that night, along with five members of his bench, were part of the 23-man squad when Northern Ireland headed to Euro 2016 less than three years later.
“Sometimes when you hit rock bottom, there’s only one place to go and that’s to come back from it,” said McAuley when asked about the dramatic turnaround.
Even if hindsight shows how rash a decision it would have been, there were questions over O’Neill’s future after the result.
McAuley, whose goal against Ukraine in Lyon later gave Northern Ireland their first ever win at a European Championships, says such doubts never permeated into the senior playing group.
“It’s one of them things, there was probably a real transitional stage. There was the old guard and then there was new players coming in and Michael was coming in,” said the former West Bromwich Albion centre-back.
“It’s difficult really for an international manager when you think of how many actual training sessions you get, building relationships with players, getting your points across. These things do take time.
“But Michael had a way that he wanted to do things, and we could see that, we were behind it. It just got there, it just clicked. There were so many factors around it, but the belief that we had in what we were being asked to do was what really galvanised us to move that forward.”
