Euro 2016: The maths says Northern Ireland will qualify

Michael O'Neill has Northern Ireland dreaming of a Euro 2016 spot

Michael Lintorn has crunched the figures and believes that 20 points will see Northern Ireland to France...

Every home nation has made a tremendous start to Euro 2016 qualifying, yet Northern Ireland's has unquestionably been the best of the bunch. That's not just because they have won three times but because of who they have beaten; they have triumphed away to top two seeds Hungary and Greece.

The result is that, with every nation playing three fixtures, Michael O'Neill's men boast nine points, giving them a two-point lead over Romania in second and a five-point cushion over Finland in third - a position worth at least a play-off place. Euro 2012 quarter-finalists Greece are eight points behind.

Despite their success, they are 5.79/2 outsiders to top Group F and unpopular with punters - with the shortest price that they have been snapped up at to date being 11.5 - while 4.0 is the lowest that they have been backed at to rank in the top two.

To try to ascertain what Northern Ireland need to do in their remaining seven matches to progress, we have recorded the point totals of every team who finished first, second and third in a six-team UEFA qualifying pool for World Cup 2010, Euro 2012 and World Cup 2014.

Twenty-two groups fitted the bill and the average tally with which those were won was 25, while it took 20 to finish second (which also secures automatic passage in this campaign) and 16 was the standard accumulation for those coming third.

In only one of those 22 groups was 20 points not enough to deliver a top-two spot, so that should be Northern Ireland's goal, setting them an eminently achievable target of 11 points from seven games.

Four of those take place at fortress Windsor Park, where Northern Ireland averaged 2.5 points per encounter in Euro 2008 preliminaries and 2.0 in the World Cup 2010 build-up - the previous two campaigns in which they were as competitive as they currently are.

If they hit even the lower of those two benchmarks, they will be left requiring a mere three points from three ventures abroad to face Romania, Faroe Islands (22 defeats in their past 25 qualifiers) and Finland to reach the desired 20-point mark.

It might not be possible to maintain that level, but it will be hugely disappointing if they don't earn the seven more points likely to prove sufficient for a play-off at least, given the combination of the four home dates left on the calendar and a trip to Faroe Islands.