We had quite a good squad, we went out there and played okay in their first three games then we were awful in the fourth.
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He added: “We had a team meeting yesterday where me and [joint coach] Heimir Hallgrimsson were playing devil’s advocate and trying to get the players back down to earth because whatever is happening around us we have to deal with it”. The 67-year-old has played England seven times – as Sweden and Iceland manager – and never lost.
A few of our readers were less anxious about what Shearer might be able to do for England, and more about what the England job might do to Shearer.
Wayne Rooney admits England’s 2-1 defeat to Iceland is embarrassing but insists he is not retiring from worldwide football.
Glenn told a news conference on Tuesday: “We clearly need an inspirational manager who can harness all of the resources that the English game… has got, everything we have now got at (the national football centre) St George’s Park, to make us more resilient in tournaments”.
“My emotions are obvious ones”.
“I don’t really know what I am doing here, I thought my statement last night was sufficient”, he told reporters. You can’t motivate players who only care about themselves and their bank balance.
“I’m very fragile today”.
England fans expecting the FA’s most experience football minds to conduct an exhaustive search for the next manager of the Three Lions may be forced to temper their expectations knowing that FA chief executive officer Martin Glenn is on the job.
“As I said, it has got to be the best man or woman for the job”, Glenn said.
“I think I should be the last person to say it’s got to be a national”. It wasn’t a good night for anybody, because we wanted to stay in this tournament.
“We saw the end result in all its gruesome detail in Nice on Monday when another major tournament ended in calamity and blame”.
Veteran manager Harry Redknapp, considered for the job before Hodgson was appointed in 2012, went even further by telling talkSPORT radio: “Glenn is your man”.
But UEFA’s interim Secretary General, Theodore Theodoridis, said the victory was not entirely unexpected after the country of just 330,000 people invested heavily in recent years to develop its soccer infrastructure.
Theodoridis, who more or less ruled himself out of running for UEFA’s presidential election next September, said that Iceland’s success was not a surprise.
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Southgate – perhaps best known for missing a spot-kick in the Euro 96 semi-final penalty shoot-out defeat against Germany at Wembley – restored some of his reputation with victory at the prestigious Toulon tournament in May having had a disappointing European Under-21 campaign past year.
