Ireland's draw against Bosnia for the Euro 2016 playoff was not the best outcome we could have hoped for, but not for the reasons you may think.

Drawing the team with the top co-efficient, a team in scintillating form with a handful of world-class players was one thing. But it was the scheduling that invited hell.

You see, the first leg is set to take place in Zenica on Friday and this Friday is Friday. Whilst this may seem like a non-issue for most rational people, it's something that doesn't doesn't sit right with our manager Martin O'Neill.

According to numerous reporters at the playoff draw in Geneva, O'Neill was generally upbeat after Ireland and Bosnia were drawn together but the colour drained from his face when he saw that the first game was to played on Friday the 13th.

Speaking to the Examiner immediately after the draw, O'Neill was questioned on the game being played on Friday the 13th and he responded with a no-comment that was louder than words.

Yeah, yeah… Friday and Monday…I’ll refrain from that, I’ll not go there.

The Irish manager then deflected the question, citing that many people involved in the game have superstitions.

If truth be known, I would have said that 95 percent of players are superstitious, absolutely. If you did something really well in a game, you’d try to remember what you did beforehand. And you would continue that for a while until you changed and stuck with another superstition.

A bizarre response to an easy question, surely, but O'Neill's superstitious nature has been evident throughout his career.

Ahead of an FA cup semi final with Aston Villa he was quizzed on the possibility of an unlucky hotel and his superstitions in general, to which he had this to say:

I wouldn't want to give you my superstitions, you’d laugh into oblivion with them.

When managing Sunderland, O'Neill insisted that his players stayed in the same hotel in Durham every night before a home game. This was considered quite unusual as most of the players lived within the vicinity anyway and there was simply no real need to stay there. He had established that this particular hotel was the only one to be used.

31

O'Neill's best known superstition is his fondness for the number 31, which coincidentally is a reversal of the cursed 13. He has had the number printed onto every tracksuit of every club he's managed and amazingly he's refused to ever reveal why he is so bound to number 31.

Many have tried to get an answer out of him. Journalists have got to know him and spoken to him off the record in hope that they'd persuade him to reveal his secret but he has never folded, maintaining he'd have to kill you if he told you.

There's been many theories as to why he chooses to have the number follow him wherever he goes ranging from the plausible to completely insane.

The most likely theory is that the number simply represents O'Neill's birthday which is March (3) the first (1). Yet there's hardly any reason why he would shroud such a banal explanation in years of secrecy.

Some of the other theories tend to air on the side of ridiculous.

Perhaps the zaniest theory mentioned for the number is one that involves Brazilian defender Rafael Scheidt. Apparently the defender was so bad during O'Neill's time at Celtic that he sacked him during pre season and wore his squad number (#31) on his top from that point onwards to remind everyone of the standards he expected.

As much as I'd love for this to be true, it isn't. O'Neill wore the number during his time at Leicester City, where you can see him pictured above with a much healthier head of hair.)

O'Neill made the matter all the more mysterious when he said to a reporter years ago that he would one day reveal his reasons for wearing the number as if it were behind some sort of evil master plan. Still, the reporter remains none the wiser.

Hopefully this supernatural behaviour doesn't come into play on Friday. Some will argue that our bad luck has already come in after Jon Walters, Shane Long and John O'Shea were all ruled out of Friday's game, however a more rational football fan will just tell you that's the nature of football.

All we can hope that O'Neill is able to cast his demons to one side this Friday 13th and steer us to a positive result in Zenica.