After losing a second successive Euros final, England coach Gareth Southgate acknowledges Spain’s superiority and discusses the challenges faced by the team, including captain Harry Kane’s performance.
Bollywood Fever: Devastated by a second successive Euros final defeat, England coach Gareth Southgate graciously acknowledged Spain’s triumph, praising them as the best team in the tournament. Spain, who won all seven games in Germany, secured the trophy with a 2-1 victory over England, thanks to a late goal by Mikel Oyarzabal.
“As always in these games, it’s fine margins. But I think they were the best team in the tournament and over the piece they deserved to win,” Southgate said. He admitted that England struggled with possession, allowing Spain to dominate with 63% possession. “They press you really well and you’ve got to get out of that pressure and we weren’t able to do that and in the end that meant they had more control of the game, and that can wear you down a bit.”
Despite being outplayed, England remained competitive. Southgate lamented a late missed opportunity, where a header was cleared off the line, which could have changed the game’s outcome. “That said, we were still right in there when we got the equaliser, so the game was still wide open,” he reflected.
Southgate, determined to secure England’s first trophy since the 1966 World Cup, did not address his future with the team. “It’s going to take a while to pick all the bones out of it really,” he said, also noting the underwhelming performance of captain Harry Kane. “Physically, it’s been a tough period for him. He came in short of games and not quite got up to the level we’d have all hoped.”
Kane shared Southgate’s devastation. “Losing in a final is as tough as it gets. We did really well to get back into the game, to get to 1-1. We could have used that momentum to push on. We couldn’t quite keep the ball and we got punished for it,” he said. “It’s as painful as it could be in a football match … It’s the last stage of the tournament. There’s a lot of tired legs, a lot of tired mentality there … It’s a huge disappointment.”
Despite the heartbreak, Kane expressed the team’s support for Southgate. “We’ve made it clear we love the manager, that’s his decision, this is not the time to talk about that now. That’s down to him. He’ll go away and think about it. Right now we’re all just hurting,” he said.
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