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Northern Ireland manager Michael O’Neill is set to join Championship club Blackburn Rovers, initially in a joint role until the end of the season.

Northern Ireland face Italy in a World Cup play-off semi-final in March and then either Wales or Bosnia-Herzegovina in a final or friendly, depending on the result in Bergamo.

O’Neill is expected to be involved for both matches and, if Northern Ireland qualify against the odds, for the World Cup finals.

The 56-year-old could then take over as manager at Ewood Park, who are in the Championship’s relegation zone, on a permanent basis.

Former Northern Ireland midfielder Damien Johnson, who has been in interim charge at Blackburn, is expected to work alongside O’Neill at the Lancashire club until the end of this season.

If a deal with the Irish FA is agreed quickly, O’Neill could be in charge for Saturday’s game against Championship game at Queens Park Rangers.

Blackburn are 22nd in the Championship table, one place from safety on goal difference.

They have been without a manager since Valerien Ismael left his role on 2 February, with Johnson taking interim charge.

O’Neill had a similar agreement – combining duties with club and country – with Stoke City when his first spell as Northern Ireland manager came to a close in 2020.

However, the Covid-19 pandemic delayed the Euro 2020 play-offs and O’Neill left his role before those games took place.

He returned to the international scene in 2022 and signed a contract that ran until after the Euro 2028 campaign.

Packing down together in the Sale front row, Bevan Rodd and Ewan Ashman used to be on the same team.

On Saturday, at Murrayfield, they could still have been.

In April 2021, then-England coach Eddie Jones dispatched forwards coach Matt Proudfoot to Sale’s training ground to talk to both players, as then uncapped, about their international ambitions.

Ashman – who started Scotland’s opening Six Nations game in Rome but who misses the Calcutta Cup through injury – was born in Canada and raised in Manchester, but his father is from Edinburgh.

Rodd, born in Dunoon in western Scotland and raised on the Isle of Man, has English heritage on his father’s side of the family.

Under rugby’s rules, Rodd and Ashman could play for either England or Scotland.

They opted for different routes.

Seven months after Proudfoot’s visit, Ashman scored a try on his Scotland debut against Australia at Murrayfield. Six days later, also against the Wallabies, Rodd appeared for England for the first time.

Given the countries’ shared border and history, hundreds of prospects face the same choice.

England wing Tom Roebuck was born in Inverness. Henry Pollock, whose parents are both Scottish, used to support them instead of England as a child. Fin Smith, whose grandfather played for Scotland in the 1950s, could also have worn blue.

For Scotland, scrum-half Ben White, a serial Calcutta Cup try-scorer, was born in Stoke, captained England’s Under-20s and even appeared for them in a non-Test fixture against the Barbarians.

Centre Huw Jones moved to England as a toddler and stayed for the rest of his childhood. Full-back Tom Jordan has a Blackpool-born grandmother.

Two weeks ago, 12 miles from Twickenham, Scotland parked coaches on very English lawns.

In the stately surroundings of RGS Surrey Hills school in Dorking, a group of Under-16 and Under-18 prospects ran through drills under the eyes of staff from Scottish Rugby’s SQ (Scottish Qualified) programme.

The scheme is designed to establish connections with youngsters who, like Ashman, Rodd and many others, live and play outside of Scotland, but could one day represent its senior sides.

The SQ programme’s coaches, which include English-born former Scotland international Peter Walton, act on tip-offs from schools and clubs.

They also set up a recruiting station at high-level age-grade rugby events, inviting those with the ancestry and interest to scan a QR code and enter their details.

All countries work to maximise their talent pool.

England are keen to ensure that Under-20 Rugby World Cup winner Junior Kpoku, who plays for Toulon and could become available to France, will go on to wear white at senior level.

South African-born centre Benhard Janse van Rensburg will soon be eligible for England on residence grounds after the Rugby Football Union successfully asked for a review of his tie to the Springboks.

But for nations with a smaller talent pool – Scotland has about 50,000 club players, compared to England’s 880,000 – there is a higher premium on making sure a particular promising youngster chooses to represent them.

What are the factors that come into a player’s decision?

First and foremost, there is national pride.

Ashman said that back in 2021, he explained “quite bluntly” to England’s coaches that he wanted to play for Scotland.

Sometimes, however, players can be torn between different parts of their identity.

Flanker Gary Graham, the son of former Scotland prop George Graham, grew up in Carlisle. He attended a training camp with England and, perhaps in an effort to wind up his father in a joint interview, told the Daily Mail in February 2018 that he “feels more English than Scottish”.

Other factors can sway players.

Money is one.

England’s best players can earn more than £150,000 a year for a season that involves around 12 Tests as part of their union’s new central contract system.

Scotland’s players get less. Their match fees are around £5,000 a Test, with bonuses dependent on the team’s final standing in the Six Nations table and their own personal involvement in the campaign.

Players might however make a calculated decision on which nation offers the surest path to the Test stage.

Scotland’s smaller player numbers may be a disadvantage overall, but for individuals it translates to a shorter route to international contention and less chance of being churned out once you get there.

Dual-qualified wing Ruaridh McConnochie won two caps for England in 2019, but was quickly discarded from Eddie Jones’ notoriously high-turnover set-up, leaving him in Test limbo.

Picking Scotland, as he did after a three-year stand down period later in his career, may have meant more international opportunities.

Scotland officials make the alignment and communication between Gregor Townsend’s senior side, national second-string and age-grade teams and the country’s two professional outfits a selling point to prospects.

Players’ decisions at international level also have a knock-on effect on their club careers.

Ben Vellacott, who has represented Scotland though age-grade levels, turned down an invite to be part of Townsend’s senior squad in 2018 and instead attended an England training camp.

“As much as I wanted to play for Scotland, I had to be careful I wasn’t without a job.” he told BBC Sport in 2021.

Vellacott was coming to the end of his contract with Gloucester and, with Prem rules requiring clubs to meet a quota of English-qualified players, playing for Scotland and becoming ineligible would have made him a less appealing signing for English clubs.

“You have got to be careful,” Vellacott added.

“You can play once or twice for your country, struggle to pick up a contract and then slip down the pecking order.”

Conversely, sometimes English rugby’s selection policies are more likely to drive talent towards Scotland.

Steve Borthwick is restricted to picking players from English clubs. Townsend is free to pick whoever he likes, from wherever they play.

Scotland internationals do not have to pick between playing for their country versus broadening horizons and inflating bank balances abroad.

White for instance, would not have been able to take up the chance to play with club Toulon in France and remain on England’s pathway. Jones will join him next season on the Cote d’Azur and remain an integral part of Scotland’s plans.

For younger prospects, education can be key, with Prem clubs’ partnerships with prestigious schools and university courses luring players across the border and potentially into the English system.

The Scottish influence at Newcastle Red Bulls could be a development to watch.

Townsend is working as a part-time consultant at the club, which was bought and lavishly backed by the energy drink giant last summer. His former Scotland team-mate Jonny Petrie is managing director and fellow Scot Neil McIlory is general manager.

Gavin Vaughan, Scotland’s chief analyst and a long-time part of Townsend’s back room, is reportedly joining the club as head of recruitment at the end of the Six Nations.

Among Newcastle’s spate of recent signings are George Turner and Elliot Millar Mills, both part of Scotland’s matchday 23 on Saturday.

Could Newcastle be a friendly English outpost for Scottish-qualified talent?

That is still to be seen.

One thing isn’t though.

With the residency period for players to qualify for a nation having been increased from three to five years in 2021, so-called “project” players are now a rare species.

It makes little sense to invest such time and money importing a player who might only become available for one Rugby World Cup cycle.

I’ve talked a lot in this column about all the different work a manager does in trying to build everything you need in place at a club to be successful, but this week I want to talk about what happens around a game itself – before, during and afterwards.

For me, preparation for any game always started two hours after the one I had just managed.

My drive home to the south coast on a Saturday night after a game could take three hours or more, and much of that would be spent on the phone while I had precious quiet time.

When I was at Stoke City, my chairman Peter Coates would always speak to me then if we lost. If we’d won, he never bothered, knowing I wouldn’t need comforting.

Win or lose, however, I would always ring my assistants, David Kemp and Gerry Francis, and we would discuss the game in finer detail – away from the stadium to give us a different perspective.

Then I would contact my chief scout, who would have been at our next opponent’s game, for a quick run-down of what he had seen – their shape, patterns, strength, weaknesses and any injuries.

By the time I arrived home then, whatever our result, I would have my dinner on a tray in front of the TV, while watching a recording of our opponent’s games, which I could get downloaded.

The players’ week is always scheduled around the next game too. Monday was a light training session with the players who played on Saturday, and a debrief in a match-related game versus the reserves.

Throughout my managerial career, I always wanted to show people I worked with what I wanted, and we would go through positives and negatives from Saturday live on the pitch.

If they needed it clarified then, whatever it was, it was sorted out in a game-related session on the grass. The players who hadn’t started on Saturday stayed out afterwards, and had a much tougher morning.

This kind of work was always vital to me for us to get things right the following Saturday. Whether it was at Stoke, Crystal Palace or West Brom, I always recognised each team’s strengths, and we all needed to be aware of the team’s identity.

Yes, at each of those clubs we took different routes to get to our objective, but the aims – and challenges – were the same.

Having that clear identity and also a system that suits your players is paramount to success, but as a manager you also have to be confident and brave in leading and directing your strong personal views.

Players will always test you, but will respect clarity and leadership if it stands firm under pressure. The reason I am mentioning this now, in respect to game days, is because it matters the most then.

The best example I can give is in the week before games against the very top teams I went overboard trying to exude confidence in my team and my tactics.

After a full week of working on every player – drilling into each individual the understanding of their role in the team and how it would affect everything if he did not carry it off – I would then set about the ways we could hurt the opposition.

Obviously set-plays have now become a byword for how teams can do that successfully, but that was the case before me and it is the same now I have retired.

As well as attacking set-plays, defending them was something else we would work on. Whether it was in attack or defence, every individual knew his own personal challenge.

On the Saturday, I would turn up for a home game at about 11am, and in my early years I would also train myself before games.

At this stage, with only a few hours to go until kick-off, I would run through everything again and wait until the lads started to arrive. Once they were all settled, I would have a quick chat – nothing too rousing! – and then leave the dressing room.

Once the opposition teamsheet arrived, about 75 minutes before kick-off, I would check our markers against their players – this was important because I always man-marked!

I would take that board into our dressing room, and out I would go again, until they arrived back from their warm-ups. Everything said from then on until the players left to start the game was confidence filling, with no negatives at all.

The actual team talk itself and the last things you said to the players could be very different depending on the occasion. It was not always me who gave it, either.

Again at Stoke, I got Ricardo Fuller up to speak right before our FA Cup semi-final against Bolton at Wembley in 2011.

Ric was such a great character and also a player with exceptional ability. Unfortunately he was injured and out of the game but he delivered a once-in-a-lifetime speech to the team, quoting Nelson Mandela.

We won the game 5-0 and to this day I am sure Ric believes his speech drove the lads to that famous result. The players would all tell you it certainly got them going.

It just shows you that the way to succeed in football management is not set in stone. You need tremendous resilience, yes, but also many more human strings to your bow.

In my early years at Stoke, we were always the underdogs, and the atmosphere was off the charts, never mind who we played.

As time went by and we became established, teams coming to Stoke were much more prepared for the experience, and our supporters became less reliant on our underdog status and rightly so.

To make up for this I began to use more psychological methods to generate the atmosphere in the dressing room that would help motivate the players.

That might mean mentioning recent comments or coverage that was negative towards us, or even bringing up stuff I had remembered from our early days at the club – anything that criticised us in any shape of form, that I knew would generate a positive response from the lads.

What you say at half-time is important too.

I would always get two or three main points over about how the match was going, but you have to be careful what you say and do because the break can dramatically change the whole flow of the game.

I’ve watched my team be really on it in the first half, then completely lose control of the game inside the first five minutes of the second half – and vice versa.

It’s something all managers and coaches must be wary of, and I certainly was.

I often tell the story of how Stoke were once 2-0 up at Blackburn at half-time and, as they were walking off the pitch, I just got a feeling a bit of complacency was setting in with our lads, who were patting each other on the back.

So, I decided to liven the dressing room up and picked on my captain Ryan Shawcross, who – by the way – had been absolutely outstanding that half. I gave him both barrels, and that left everyone extremely shocked.

The second half came and went with us seeing the game out and getting a deserved victory, but Ryan came to see me on the Monday – he was still pretty upset and did not know what had happened.

I explained my reasons – I knew Blackburn boss Sam Allardyce would be after a big response from his lads in the second half, so to compensate for that I had to put everyone on edge.

As a manager, you can obviously change things when the game is going on too.

When I started in management, there was only one substitute permitted, but today you can change five players.

That’s half of the outfield team that have started the game so, with squads so large now too, then it certainly can be a massive help to the coach.

I look at the top teams’ benches now and sometimes I can’t believe the quality on there, which is something else that has changed in the past 30 years.

Making changes is always a pre-meditated option. Yes, I have taken players off for playing poorly, because we needed to hold on to a lead or were desperately trying to claw a goal back, but most of the time you have still got a plan.

As I’ve mentioned before when I talked about scouting players, the game has moved on to such an extent in the past 30 years that computers play a big part now in providing you with information.

It is the same during today’s games too, to the extent computers on the side of the pitch can release certain data that can have an effect on a manager’s thinking, either around individuals for substitutions or overall team analysis.

I always trusted my own eyes, though. Although I have seen some fantastic advancements made with team analysis and individuals’ live game data, I always backed my experience and judgement.

Of course those decisions can have a huge impact if you get them right. I listen now to some commentators drooling over substitutions that change games, and what a genius the manager was to make those changes.

Well, I have had those plaudits myself but, if the truth be known, I had picked the wrong XI to start with.

Immediately after full-time, I was always quick to move on, whatever the result.

I would always explain to the players on Monday if I needed to get things off my chest about their performances.

It is always the manager who gets more of a grilling at full-time – many questions always followed the end of each Premier League fixture, with the agenda driven by the result.

As a manager, you are thrust almost immediately into the jaws of our unforgiving media and questions about tactics, substitutions and your team’s overall performance are fired at you, sometimes under severe pressure.

Obviously the more damning investigations are aimed at the losing team’s manager, where it is more than likely the questions are preordained.

For the winner, there are plaudits – but whatever the outcome, you have to think forwards not back.

I was soon back in my car and heading home… thinking about the next match.

Brad Currie’s biography on social media platform X reads: “21/22 OR: 1k. 22/23 OR: 1.8k.”

He will likely open the bowling for Scotland against England at the T20 World Cup on Saturday, but those numbers do not reference his cricket stats.

Instead, they are Currie’s record playing Fantasy Football because online he is known by another name, ‘FPL Schofield’.

There he runs an account with thousands of followers offering tips and tactics on the online football game.

“My notes page on my iPad is filled with FPL transfers and fixtures rotations,” Currie tells BBC Sport.

“My YouTube algorithm is just FPL videos galore. My Twitter is nothing other than football and even my TikTok.

Currie, 27, was once ranked 30th in the world in a game now played by almost 13 million people.

Playing a World Cup in India comes with one obvious problem – the five-and-a-half-hour time difference to the UK.

This week’s Premier League matches kicked off in the early hours and the deadlines to make transfers were late at night.

“It was horrible,” he says.

“I can’t figure out a way to get the games on and I am even struggling to see highlights.

“It has been absolute torture, but thankfully it is the FA Cup this weekend.”

Though the secret has started to come out, the professional cricket world was initially unaware of Currie’s alter ego.

These days he gets messages from team-mates and opponents asking for advice.

“[Sussex bowler] Sean Hunt is one,” Currie says.

“He messaged me a screenshot before our West Indies game and said: ‘I know you have bigger things at play, but what do you think of my team?’

“The other day he said: ‘What do you think of my team? Oh and well bowled.'”

So what about a tip for the rest of the FPL season?

“Chip strategy,” Currie replies quickly. “Dead-end into Gameweek 31. Wildcard in 32. Bench boost 33.

“Triple captain whenever you want.”

Currie is the brother of Scott – the Scotland bowler who was called up by England last year.

They both qualify for Scotland via their Scottish dad, having grown up on England’s south coast. Left-armer Brad studied sports psychology at Bournemouth University.

A lifelong fan, Brad was at the Cherries’ 3-2 win over Liverpool at the Vitality Stadium – when Amine Adli scored a 95th-minute winner against the Premier League champions – the day he got the call from coach Owen Dawkins to tell him he had made Scotland’s World Cup squad.

“I said to my mate: ‘I know exactly what this is, but I can’t pick this up because I won’t get any signal,” Currie says.

“I got to the phone later and Dawks said: ‘That was a good result, wasn’t it?’

“I said: ‘Yeah, and I hope you’re not going to ruin my mood now.'”

Having been pipped at qualifying by the Netherlands and Italy, Scotland got a place at this World Cup when Bangladesh opted to boycott the tournament.

The preceding weeks were uncertain, filled with claims and counterclaims about whether the Tigers would take part and what it would mean for Scotland if they did not. Even the players were not immune.

“I was at Sussex training in the indoor school and was asking all of the powers that be and the coaching staff,” Currie says.

“It was crazy to have people saying we were going. I just thought, ‘you know more than me and I am one of the players in the official Scotland group chat’.”

As a county pro at Sussex, Currie was fortunate he had been training through the winter.

Bowlers’ workloads are notoriously important to manage, however, and Scotland’s focus switched from the Cricket World Cup League 2 at the end of March to a T20 World Cup in India at the start of February.

“I don’t know what date it officially got announced but the two days after were the weekend and I just did nothing,” he says.

“My girlfriend’s family were like: ‘Should you not be training? Should you not be doing something?’

Uncertainty also surrounded the availability of the younger Currie brother.

Despite being picked by England for the tour of Ireland last year, he did not make his debut, leaving some to wonder if he could switch back to the Scots.

As it turned out, one spell as a substitute fielder made him ineligible.

“I had to text him and ask,” Brad says.

“My heart sank because there are loads of brothers out here playing.

“We have just played the Manentis and the Moscas [against Italy]. There’s the Sheikh brothers [Nepal] as well.

“It probably would have forced Mum and Dad to remortgage the house and get some flights out but there’s only one son out here so it’s not needed.

“He is going to try and please Mum and play for England, but I am going to keep Dad sweet and stick to my Scottish genes.”

England’s defeat by West Indies effectively means Saturday’s encounter is a must-win for both sides.

They last met at the 2024 T20 World Cup when an impressive Scotland batting performance meant England were faced with a tricky 110 in 10 overs before rain prevented what could have been an intriguing situation.

“It is something we will never have the answer to,” Currie says.

“I have learned to fear no one and go into games expecting to win.

“I have a fair background in sports psychology and that is the best way to approach these games.

“They have Adil Rashid [batting] at 11 with 10 first-class hundreds and I haven’t got a first-class double-digit score. I am not naive.

“[But] They have got to play and travel. We have played two games at Eden Gardens.