Football Association CEO Martin Glenn defended Roy Hodgson, claiming that he left England in a stronger position than when he took over the job.
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Iceland’s soccer Vikings fought back from a goal down to beat England 2-1 at Euro 2016 in one of the biggest shocks in the sport’s history that forced the immediate resignation of England manager Roy Hodgson.
The England fans who jeered the team off the field at halftime and fulltime at the Stade de Nice will likely have a different opinion.
For many, however, the potential appointment of Southgate as England manager would represent a desperately underwhelming choice.
“We believed that we could get to the quarter-final and get beyond that”.
“On the night Iceland were the better side”, he said.
In a media conference at England’s Euro 2016 base in Chantilly, Hodgson denied that senior players questioned his tactics. We have some very good footballers at the moment, but we are very short of people that you could actually call world-class.
“I don’t really know what I’m doing here, I’m no longer the England manager but I was told to come”.
The 68-year-old resigned at his post-match press conference, leading him to ponder aloud why he had to square up to the media again on Tuesday afternoon. The perennial problem is that England seem brittle in the business end of a tournament.
I would say to Wayne “Take us to to the next World Cup and then let’s analyse your feelings when we get there”.
“The more I think about England’s humiliation against Iceland, the more those two words come into my mind”.
“We are looking for the best person, not necessarily the best Englishman”.
The FA has quickly turned its attention to finding a successor, with England Under-21s manager Gareth Southgate the overriding early favourite.
He insisted, however, that his players showed “good signs of good football” in three group stage games before they melted – Hodgson called it a “one-off” – against Iceland’s team drawn from a tiny pool of professional players among the island’s 330,000 people.
“There will be David Gill, Dan Ashworth and myself carrying out the process”.
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“You had Steven Gerrard’s error at the World Cup last time which cost us, you’ve got goalkeeping errors”.
