At 21-years-old, Norwich City’s McConville is the more senior of the pair.
Having been given his debut off the bench at home to Belarus two years ago this week, among the former Brighton man’s early international assignments was trying to keep a rampant Alexander Isak in check during a 5-1 defeat by Sweden.
In the short time since he has looked an increasingly commanding figure, leading this Nations League group in clearances made with both head and boot.
“It would be unbelievable to keep that record for these last two games and go the whole of the campaign,” he said of what is Northern Ireland’s longest run without conceding a goal since 2017.
McConville notes that the streak is a team effort and product of collective work-rate, rather than just the defensive three alone.
“We’re a team that works hard, a team that doesn’t want to give anything up.
“We’re confident in ourselves and we know that we’re a good side.”
It is McConville who has taken on the Ballard role in the middle of the defence for the past three games, with Atcheson on the right and Oxford United’s Ciaron Brown, himself superb through the campaign so far, playing from the left.
On the developing understanding between an emerging unit, McConville added: “We’re enjoying playing together.
“It’s still early days together and we have to keep taking it game by game and doing what the gaffer tells us and the work on the training pitch.
“We don’t have much time together when we’re here [in international camp] so it’s important to do all we can.”
On the gable walls of the tough, working-class streets of east Belfast, the mystical beasts of Narnia vie for brick space with balaclava-wearing loyalists. The murals of the city have long projected the power of paramilitaries, but in recent years they have also begun to reflect the more positive contributions made by other local people, including the author CS Lewis.
Lewis was born in Dundela in 1898 in an attractive terrace house that has sadly since been demolished to be replaced by rather unattractive flats. But elsewhere in this part of the city, the Lewis connection is being built on and celebrated. CS Lewis Square is in the Holywood Arches neighbourhood and has a short walking trail featuring metal sculptures of Mr and Mrs Beaver, Mr Tumnus and other beloved characters from The Chronicles of Narnia. The centrepiece is a gigantic Aslan, towering over all from atop a circular mound.
A CS Lewis mural in east Belfast. Photograph: Stephen Barnes NI/Alamy
About 15 minutes’ walk away, St Mark’s church on the Holywood Road is the proud custodian of a much smaller lion that may have inspired Lewis’s creation of Aslan. His grandfather, the Rev Thomas Hamilton, ministered here, living in the rectory for 13 years, and his front door was decorated with a beautiful brass lion’s head doorknob. The original has been removed for safekeeping, but an exact replica attracts thousands of Lewis pilgrims each year.
Leafy Circular Road, half a mile away, is where the Lewis family moved in 1905 to a large, redbrick house that, back then, was on the outskirts of the city. The road has since been subsumed by the growth of the town, but remains the realm of the prosperous. The house, called Little Lea, is privately owned, but can be seen from the iron gates at the end of the drive.
“To a child, it seemed less like a house than a city,” Lewis wrote of the family home in his autobiography, Surprised By Joy. “I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude.”
The Aslan sculpture in CS Lewis Square, east Belfast. Photograph: Radharc Images/Alamy
Little Lea appears in the opening two Narnia books, first when a boy exploring a large attic in The Magician’s Nephew finds a way into another world, and then in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when a game of hide and seek leads a group of inquisitive children to that same magical world a generation later.
Although it was close to east Belfast’s industrial heartland, it was also just a fence clamber away from the fields, hills and woodland glens that fringed the city like a vast adventure playground. As children, Lewis and his elder brother Warnie seem to have had a freedom to wander that would terrify modern parents. They would trek for hours up into the hills between Belfast and Strangford Lough, and travelling that way today still evokes a sense of romantic escapism.
The Belmont Road takes you up, climbing dramatically out of the city and into the expansive high ground that towers over Belfast, Bangor and Newtownards. There are many viewpoints up here. Lewis didn’t record the exact spot that inspired the following ethereal description of the views he loved, but for this writer, the crags of the Whitespots country park on the hill above Newtownards are a pretty good bet, especially as this place also chimes loudly with his descriptions of the stone table on which Aslan was sacrificed in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Mussenden Temple on the north coast of Co Derry. Photograph: Ballygally View Images/Getty Images
“Looking south with a little east in it, a different world,” he writes in Surprised By Joy. “And having seen it, blame me if you can for being a romantic. For here is the thing itself, utterly irresistible, the way to the world’s end, the land of longing, the breaking and blessing of hearts. You are looking across … the plain of Down, and seeing beyond it the Mourne Mountains.”
Lewis once told Warnie that the view from the Mournes above Rostrevor looking down over Carlingford Lough was his idea of Narnia. The statement is now stencilled on a bench at a viewpoint in the town’s Kilbroney forest park. Sitting there, in the majesty of this area, it is easy to imagine, as Lewis later wrote in an essay, that a “giant might raise his head over the next ridge”.
Rostrevor is an hour’s drive south of Belfast, and an hour’s drive in the other direction will take you to the equally spectacular north coast, where Lewis holidayed with his mother as a young child. There’s an ongoing debate among Lewis scholars and his many passionate fans about whether it was Dunluce Castle or Downhill Demesne that inspired Cair Paravel, the castle capital of Narnia.
The ruins of Dunluce perch precipitously on the coast east of Portrush, while Downhill Demesne, near Castlerock, contains what remains of the old Downhill House but also the iconic Mussenden Temple, which much better fits the description of Cair Paravel looking “like a great star resting on the seashore”.
Lewis was writing his autobiography at the same time he was producing the seven Chronicles of Narnia. The experiences and landscapes he was remembering for his memoir very likely bled into the creation of his magical kingdom. And so the heavenly, pastoral landscapes of Narnia on the murals of east Belfast might feel familiar even to those locals who haven’t read the books or watched the screen adaptations. The wholesome images of his imagination being sandwiched between paintings glorifying terrorism is an unusual setting for a tribute to the world’s most famous Christian apologist, but perhaps in Belfast, as in Narnia, good will win in the end.
Storms Boelo and Austen kill a man in Scotland and cut power to thousands of homes in the UK, France and Germany.
Published On 26 Oct 202626 Oct 2026
A pair of storms battering northern Europe have killed one man, cut power to more than 150,000 homes, and disrupted flights and phone networks.
More than 82,000 homes in the United Kingdom, nearly 60,000 in France, and at least 10,000 in Germany had no electricity on Sunday after storms Boelo and Austen passed through the region within 24 hours, according to authorities in the countries.
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A falling tree killed a man, 60, in southwestern Scotland on Sunday, while another falling tree injured two women in central Scotland, the Press Association reported.
Winds of up to 135 km/h (84 mph) were recorded in the Argyll and Bute regions of western Scotland. Trees and power cables brought down by the storm blocked roads and rail lines across Scotland and northern England.
In Brighton, on England’s southern coast, Austen blew away an unused pier on Friday.
Authorities have warned of flood risk in regions of both Scotland and England.
The Met Office, the UK’s national forecaster, warned that Boelo would bring a danger to life from flying debris and crashing waves and said people should stay indoors as much as possible.
From France to Germany
Across the English Channel, Europe battled its first big storm of the autumn, with strong winds inflicting widespread power cuts.
French energy company Enedis said that at Austen’s peak on Saturday, some 288,000 homes had no electricity. Some 59,000 remained without power at midday Sunday, mainly in Normandy and Brittany.
A marathon runner in the midst of a race in northern France was lightly injured by a tree knocked over in strong winds.
In Germany, Austen cut power to 10,000 homes in and around the southwestern town of Freiburg-Breisgau on Sunday. The town’s main hospital said it had to limit service to emergency cases because of the blackout, which also cut the mobile phone network.
German police said two people were seriously hurt on Saturday by scaffolding blown away by Austen’s strong winds at a market in the town of Nastatten.
The storms also hit the Netherlands and Belgium, where falling trees injured four people in Brussels on Saturday.
In the Netherlands, north of the island of Schiermonnikoog, three crew members on board a freight ship were injured in the storms, according to the country’s coastguard. Two of them were winched off and taken by helicopter to a hospital on the mainland.
The storms caused hundreds of flights to be cancelled or diverted across northern Europe, including at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, one of the continent’s busiest hubs.
Experts have warned of more extreme weather events due to climate change.
Thousands of Protestant Orange Order members have marched through Portadown, Northern Ireland, ahead of a court ruling on a ban on a separate parade through a mainly Catholic area. The marches have long fuelled sectarian tensions, with a previous parade in September blocked by Catholic protesters.
Former Northern Ireland Open champions Kyren Wilson and Mark Williams remain on course for a potential meeting in the final of this year’s tournament in Belfast after winning their respective quarter-finals on Friday.
World number nine Wilson ran out a convincing 6-1 winner over Anthony McGill in the afternoon session at the Waterfront Hall, while Williams, who sits one place higher in the rankings, defeated David Gilbert 6-4 during the evening’s play.
Wilson, who claimed both the world title and the NI Open crown in 2024, established a 4-0 lead over his Scottish opponent with the help of breaks of 77, 75 and 122.
McGill took the next with a run of 66 but the Englishman eased home to progress and secure a first semi-final appearance at a ranking event since March 2025, with compatriot Sam Craigie his next opponent.
Craigie advanced to only his second-ever ranking event semi-final by beating Elliot Slessor 6-2.
Slessor took an early lead after compiling an 82 but Craigie reeled off five frames in a row and ultimately clinched a comfortable passage to the last four.
Gilbert built a 3-1 lead over Williams with the help of breaks of 62, 95 and 60, but after they shared the next two, Williams scored three centuries in consecutive frames as he took the next four to seal victory.
The 51-year-old three-time world champion and 2017 NI Open winner will take on fellow Welshman Jak Jones in Saturday’s second semi-final.
Jones, who has already collected the British Open and Championship League titles this season, edged out Scott Donaldson 6-5 in a late-night thriller, a break of 84 in the decider proving decisive in booking his berth in the last four.
McArdle has shown throughout his tenure so far that he is keen to expand Northern Ireland’s squad depth and gave four players their debuts during the Portugal double header.
One of those debutants, Elmore, scored Northern Ireland’s only goal of the tie and became the second player to score on her debut under McArdle after Emily Cassap netted during the 2-1 defeat by Switzerland in June.
“I’m delighted for Kess,” McArdle continued.
“I knew she could bring that, and it’s just great that she has had that impact in Larne and also got the reward with a goal tonight.
“She’s going to add so much to the group moving forward, but so will a lot of the debutants this week, which was exciting.”
It has been a challenging window for McArdle’s side with key players such as captain Simone Magill and the experienced Laura Rafferty, Nadene Caldwell and Caragh Hamilton missing.
However, the Scot still thinks the side have set “a real enthusiastic marker” down during the tough Portugal tie.
“There have been those moments that have went against us, moments of misfortune. We’re playing a risky style of football,” he continued.
“We were on the front foot from the first whistle, and I couldn’t be prouder of the girls. This is a real enthusiastic marker for moving forward. This is getting closer to the identity that I would like for us moving forward.
“We want more energy, we want more mobility, and we want to be a lot more versatile as well. I’m really proud but also really frustrated with the scoreline.”
