Rio's Wembley pride

	13 Sep 2007
	VIDEO: Rio Ferdinand post-match
	Fresh from scoring his first goal at the new Wembley, Rio Ferdinand spoke to TheFA.com about the win over Russia.

UEFA European Championship Qualifier
8pm, Wednesday 12 September 2007
Wembley Stadium
Live on BBC1

It was Rio’s first goal on home soil for the Three Lions, taking his tally to two, and the Manchester United defender was proud to add his name to the list of England scorers at the new Wembley.

But after the 3-0 victory over a good Russian side, Ferdinand was as equally pleased to see England come through two tricky tests in a week with flying colours picking up six points to move to second spot in Group E.

He told TheFA.com: “That’s what we set out to achieve and we managed to do that, but we know we’re not finished yet and we’ve got some very tough games.

“I’m one of a few who have scored here so I’m proud to be among that select group, but we got the victory that was most important, it made it three-nil and a convincing victory.

“The game away in Russia is going to be pivotal to determine qualification, so we need to make sure we don’t jump the gun and start thinking we’ve qualified.

“We know we’ve got a hard game there so we are going to keep our feet on the floor.”

After a comfortable victory over Israel on Saturday, Wednesday’s win over Russia wasn’t as cut and dried. The visitors enjoyed sustained periods of pressure but England’s defence held firm to keep them at bay a restrict Russia, largely, to shots from range.

Another clean sheet for McClaren’s men means that they have the best defensive record across all seven Euro 2008 Qualifying groups, the two conceded in Croatia in November last year equals Holland’s goals against column, but the Dutch have played a game less.

Ferdinand believes that the extended time together has allowed the team to gel and build a good rapport and helped build a confidence that he says the team will take into their next matches in October.

“Both [Israel and Russia] posed different problems and they were both different games in different respects,” said Ferdinand.

“I think sometimes the games are only as hard as you make them yourself and we’re here at Wembley. We’re trying to make this a hard place to come and in the last two games we’ve gone a long way to making people sit up and think ‘hmm, it’s going to be difficult to come here’ it may not be as easy as people thought before.”

He continued: “When you get a sustained period of time playing together you build relationships on the pitch, so at the moment we are doing OK in that department, but we’re not qualified yet and when we do we can say well done and give ourselves a pat on the back.

“In the last two games we’ve scored six goals and conceded zero so we can’t go into the game much more on a high than we’re doing at the moment, but Estonia will posed us problems again and we’ll have to apply ourselves in the same manner.”

England
1 Paul Robinson, 2 Micah Richards, 3 Ashley Cole, 4 Steven Gerrard, 5 Rio Ferdinand, 6 John Terry (c), 7 Gareth Barry, 8 Shaun Wright-Phillips, 9 Emile Heskey (Peter Crouch, 80), 10 Michael Owen (16 Stewart Downing, 90+2), 11 Joe Cole (14 Phil Neville, 88)

Subs: 12 Wes Brown, 13 David James, 15 Alan Smith, 17 Andrew Johnson, 18 Jermain Defoe.

Head Coach Steve McClaren

Russia
16 Viacheslav Malafeev, 2 Vasily Berezutskiy, 5 Sergey Ignashevich, 10 Andrey Arshavin, 15 Diniyar Bilyaletdinov, 17 Konstantin Zyryanov, 18 Yury Zhishkov, 20 Igor Semshov (23 Vladimir Bystrov, 40), 22 Alexander Anyukov (11 Alexander Kerzakov, 80), 26 Dmitry Sychev (19 Roman Pavlyuchenko, 63), 27 Alexey Berezutskiy.

Subs: 12 Anton Shunin, 7 Dmitriy Torbinskiy, 13 Pavel Pogrebnyak, 25 Denis Koldin.

Head Coach Guus Hiddink

Kit Colours

England White shirts, Blue shorts, White socks
GK Aubergine shirt, Aubergine shorts, White socks

Russia Red shirts, White shorts, Blue socks
GK Green shirt, Green shorts, Green socks 

Match Officials
Referee Martin Hansson (SWE)
Assistant Referees Stefan Wittberg and Henrik Andren (SWE)
Fourth Official Martin Ingvarsson (SWE)

Attendance 86,106