Photo by Gordon Morrison

England 1 Portugal 14 (half time 0-6)

This game showed exactly what I expected, which was more individual play rather than team play due to the pressure Portugal applied and the quality of their player’s. The only way to be competitive is to play as a team which only can be achieved with training.

Throughout the whole game we only had few minutes where we created good moves, when the players started moving off the ball and passed the ball around. It was during this passage of play that we scored our only goal.

We need to understand that playing against one the best teams in the world with only one training session is very difficult. It is even worse when we didn’t have the proper preparation as the whole team were not always available for practice. The other teams in this tournament have been preparing for at least four weeks and the Portuguese team had seven warm up games whereas we never even managed one.

I am hoping to see a big improvement in our team play during the next two games to ensure that on Friday and Saturday we can be more competitive.

This game was shown live on Portuguese TV and the commentators emphasised the lack of training as well as the fact that the England team were missing some players from last year’s World Championships. It was also a nice touch that they mentioned our great achievement of winning the Bronze medal in the Under 17’s competition.

Today we are play our last game in the group stage against Italy, who drew with Germany 3-3.