England 0 Spain 9 (Half Time 0-5)

Experience and Individual ability of Spanish Players made the difference

Firstly I would like to emphases that our team has 7 players first year whilst Spain has 8 players last year. Just this would be enough to make difficult our game versus one the top 2 countries, however add to this Spain has to score as many goals as possible to finish first in the group as they drew with Italy on Tuesday as a result of this they pressured us full rink for all our game.

Our team were brave on man to man restricted pressuring the man with the ball which sometimes did not work very well due to fast diagonal moves from Spain and fast ball circulation. Some of the goals conceeded were due to lack of experience of our players comparing to the older Spanish players.

Our performance in the group stage was very good considering we lost 3rd place for 1 goal as we finished on the same points of Switzerland but we have -11 and Switzerland have -10 goal difference.

Today we play Portugal for quarters-final in my opinion the best team in the competition at least they have the best individual players and we are expecting a very hard game. Our objective now is looking forward to Friday’s game as if we win we will play for 5th/6th places. Therefore we will rotate all the team today against Portugal.

Other results:
Italy 3 Switzerland 0
Germany 2 Andorra 0
Portugal 5 France 0

Carlos Amaral