England loss 3-2 to Begium, may miss 2024 Summer Olympics spot
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Belgium now sits one point ahead of England in their Women's Nations League group after the result, with seven points, as opposed to England's six. Scotland has one point, while the Netherlands leads the group with nine.
With two games remaining for each club, the top teams advance to the Nations League semifinals. The two teams that advance to the final will be the European representatives at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, together with the host nation, France.
Because of the special arrangement, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, who would all participate as a Team GB squad in the Olympics, as well as England's own hopes, are all in their hands.
Amazingly, England still has a match left against Scotland, who have already been mathematically eliminated.
After the match, England manager Sarina Wiegman acknowledged that it was close.
“It’s very tight … we can only do what we can do, so we know what we have to do. We play at Wembley [against the Netherlands], that’s always very exciting, so we’re looking forward to that.
“But we also want to show again what we are, and that we can do better, against a top opponent of course, too. We have to win and we have to win by more than one, and then we have to win [against] Scotland, so [the job] is very clear.”
The loss to Belgium does mean that the process is out of England’s hands, with Belgium able to top the group even if England win both of their remaining games. “That’s life, and so that’s football too,” said Wiegman of the result
“We’re not panicking or anything. You could see that we were trying hard, we were trying to find the space and we were trying to have different crosses and play a possession game into the final third, but we just missed in the final perfect touch…although we did create chances to really score goals.” She did however admit that she felt the side were too sloppy.
“Very disappointed, we are frustrated too, I think this was unnecessary," Wiegman added.
“What we wanted to do was to play better than Friday and we won Friday, “There were a couple of things we wanted to do better today, but in the end we were too sloppy. They had more counterattacks than they did on Friday, so they did that well and I think we could have done better.”
England will play the Dutch at Wembley on December 1 before travelling north to face Scotland on December 5.
On the injured Alex Greenwood Wiegman said: "She’s fine, I haven’t spoken to her yet. I also haven’t spoken to the doctor about it yet, but I heard she’s walking around. Obviously she has a concussion, but it’s good news that she’s walking around and doing fine.”
England later updated saying that she has travelled back to England and will return to Manchester City.
“We created lots of chances but have to do better in the final third.”
— Lionesses (@Lionesses) October 31, 2023
Sarina reacts to our 3-2 defeat to Belgium ⤵️
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