Hallgrimsson backs Parrott potency amid Betis dry spell

Heimir Hallgrimsson backs Troy Parrott potency for Ireland amid Real Betis dry spell

Updated / Friday, 13 Nov 2026 14:41

Heimir Hallgrimsson has backed Troy Parrott to deliver on the goals front for the Republic of Ireland despite running into a recent dry spell for Real Betis.

Parrott is with the Boys in Green in Linz as they prepare to take on Austria in their penultimate UEFA Nations League group game on Saturday.

But the 24-year-old comes into the window having not scored in eight games for Betis across all competitions.

Parrott did score notable winning goals against Real Madrid and Lille in La Liga and the Champions League respectively.

More recently, his club manager Manuel Pellegrini cited the player's workload for Ireland as a factor in why he was rotating him in and out of his starting line-up at times - comments which Hallgrimsson gave short shrift to last week.

But on the eve of the Austria game, Parrott is one of the first names on the teamsheet for Ireland and his international manager is confident that growing pains at club level will not transfer into the national team arena.

"You never know with Troy. He pops up and score goals when he wears the green shirt," Hallgrimsson said at Friday's press conference at the Raiffeisen Arena.

"Hopefully he'll do that tomorrow. I think it was a good step for him to go to Spain in his career from Holland. He's finding his feet and you can see it in his performance there.

"He's growing and understanding better his team-mates. But he has always produced for Ireland.

"Just look at his stats in our last games. I think in the last seven qualifiers, he's scored nine goals and that's pretty good for a national team."

Hallgrimsson (above) also cited "growth" as he made tweaks to his preparations for this camp compared to the last one.

"Yeah, it's everything from changing the meetings, different layouts, we called (the players) in Monday evening. We normally start the training on Monday, call them in Sunday, so we give them an extra day to recover. It's a lot of those things," he said.

"Everyone in every department was challenged to make something different, whether it was the medical team or the kitman or whatever. So that's one of those things as well that we want to be in an environment that is a growth environment.

"We want to produce a growth environment. We did a little change as well in the media.

"So it's just changes everywhere that we want to improve, we want to step up, we want to challenge everyone in the camp to think growth mindset.

"How can I not only check my boxes, but improve my box that I'm checking in every time I come in?

"So that's the thing that we're looking for. After (the last camp), we tested our systems.

"We saw a lot of things last camp that we probably wouldn't have in a quiet camp. So no, it's just every time we should always challenge ourselves to improve our working environment.

"These guys deserve that the FAI and their environment is improving. That gets them to improve as well."

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Watch Austria v Republic of Ireland in the UEFA Nations League on Saturday from 7pm on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player. Follow our live blog on RTÉ.ie/sport and RTÉ News app and listen to live commentary on Saturday Sport on RTÉ Radio 1

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