Republic of Ireland skipper Nathan Collins: I’m driven by the hurt losing causes

Republic of Ireland skipper Nathan Collins has insisted he hates losing and is driven by the hurt it causes.

Brentford defender Collins and his international team-mates have come in for criticism is recent weeks after a difficult start to their World Cup qualifying campaign with some pundits suggesting they have become too used to defeats.

However it is an accusation the 24-year-old former Stoke, Burnley and Wolves player – who will line up against Armenia in a do-or-die game at the Aviva Stadium on Tuesday night – firmly rejects.

Collins said: “I hate losing, to be honest. I really hate it. My career, I’ve lost a lot. Just the way it is.

“I’ve played for some teams that have not been at the top of the league and you lose games and you have to pick yourself back up.

“You have to get back on the horse and go again with the next game, the next game. You might lose, you might lose. It takes so much out of you, but it’s that fire inside me where I hate losing.

“I always want to change. I always want to turn that around and just be a winner, be a winning team, win games, win against the big teams, win against the small teams.

“Always drive that same standard of just wanting to win, wanting to put goals in, wanting to keep clean sheets, wanting to stop their best players.

“That’s what it is. It’s the will to get up again and go again. When you lose, it hurts.

“You give yourself 24 hours, you look back at the game, you watch over, you watch your clips again, but you get on with it and you move on because there’s so many games.”

Ireland have to do just that as they prepare for their showdown with the Armenians, three days after suffering the misery of a last-gasp defeat in Portugal.

They held out for 91 minutes in Lisbon before Ruben Neves snatched a priceless point from their grasp and only victory against Yegishe Melikyan’s men will keep their Group F hopes alive.

That was something they could not manage in Yerevan last month, when they went down 2-1 to a team ranked 42 places below them by FIFA, a defeat Collins admits he still cannot explain.

Asked if he had been able to make any sense of that game since, he replied: “No, not really. It’s such an awkward one.

“The only thing I ever say at the end of the day is just football. Football is such a mad sport. Anything can happen. Sometimes there’s no clear explanation why, but it’s tough to take.”

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