Not since 1995, when Hope Powell was a member of the playing squad, has the last four of a major tournament been reached by England.

Now the former midfielder, National Coach for the last seven years, is aiming to lead arguably the best England squad since those days into the Women’s Euro 2005 semis.

Not that Powell is thinking any further than Wednesday. "We’re obviously aiming to make the semi-finals but right now all we’re thinking about is Denmark," she insisted as she looked ahead to perhaps the biggest game to date in her coaching career.

England, ranked seven places below the Danes at 14th in FIFA’s world rankings, will be classed as the underdogs despite going into the match as group leaders after Sunday’s 3-2 win against Finland.

On the same day Denmark held the firm group favourites Sweden to a 1-1 draw and might even have caused an upset by winning the match.

"Denmark’s confidence isrunning high after taking a point off Sweden," said the England coach, "and it’s going to be a tough game - they’re a hard, physical side and we’ll have to cope with that, but we’ve done it before and beaten them.

"They’ll be going into this game really needing to get a result after their draw in the first game, but we know that a result for us will take us through and hopefully that will drive the girls on."

England will take confidence from the 2-0 victory they produced over Denmark in their last meeting, at Fratton Park in February 2004, though confidence in any case seems to be spread around the squad in abundance following the recent run of 10 wins in 11 matches.

Captain Faye White, passed fit following the slight calf problem which led to her late substitution on Sunday, said: "The run-up to the tournament was brilliant for us and the team spirit and morale are really high.

"We weren’t at our best against Finland even though we won the game, but we know we can perform better than that and we’ll certainly have to do so to beat Denmark. No disrespect to Finland, but Denmark are more powerful all round the team.

"They are ranked a lot higher than us, but knowing we beat them last time out will be a plus for us going into the game as will the fact that we’ve beaten even higher-ranked teams over the last few months."

Italy and Norway are the high-ranking teams beaten recently and Powell, though as pragmatically as ever refusing to make any predictions, certainly feels that her team has the capability to take another notable scalp.

"We have to cope with Denmark without letting it destroy the way we want to play ourselves," she said, "but if everybody plays the way they can, we can come through."