The Three Lions Are Out But Not Down

Roy Hodg­son

Eng­land and Italy both played for the draw at the Olympic Sta­dium in Kiev on Sunday even­ing and they got exactly what they came for. Roy Hodsgon´s men were leth­ar­gic for large peri­ods of the match against a hard work­ing and well organ­ised Italian team and lacked the fight­ing spirit which had served them so well in recent games.

Soc­cer may essen­tially be a young man´s game, but without vet­eran player Andrea Pirlo´s blatant con­fid­ence the blue shirts may very well have ended up as losers. Both Eng­land and Italy struggled to cre­ate goal scor­ing oppor­tun­it­ies as the game wore on, though. The Itali­ans had the ball in net in the 115th minute, how­ever, but their effort was cor­rectly ruled out by the lines­man for off­side. Accord­ing to Eng­land coach Roy Hodg­son, how­ever, there was noth­ing more his play­ers could have done as they even­tu­ally lost to The Azzurro on pen­al­ties. Roy Hodg­son: “I have watched all these play­ers smash­ing in pen­al­ties dur­ing train­ing but you can´t repro­duce the occa­sion, the ten­sion and the nervous­ness. We had five great pen­alty takers but unfor­tu­nately for us two of them missed. We saw Ash­ley Cole scor­ing a pen­alty in the UEFA Cham­pi­ons League Final for Chelsea and Ash­ley Young has con­ver­ted many for his club sides. We worked as hard as we could and we sur­vived the cramps and phys­ical prob­lems we suffered. We´re going out of this tour­na­ment unbeaten in nor­mal time. We´re going home because we can´t win a pen­alty shootout.”

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