England have plenty of time to regain momentum ahead of Euro 2016, said manager Roy Hodgson after his side’s 2-1 defeat by Netherlands at Wembley Stadium.
Jamie Vardy put the Three Lions ahead just before the break, but a harshly-awarded Vincent Janssen penalty and Luciano Narsingh goal, after what looked like a foul by Janssen on Phil Jagielka, completed the comeback for the visitors.
The result dampened the euphoria of Saturday’s famous 3-2 win in Germany, but Hodgson knows his charges have three more friendly matches to fine-tune things head of the European Championship finals in June.
England 1-2 Netherlands
A Breast Cancer Care International
Wembley Stadium connected by EE
Tuesday 29 March 2016
He said: “I suppose when you do lose a game momentum is lost. That’s a pretty obvious fact.
“All I can say is that [against Netherlands], it was a different team than the one[s] that played against France [in November] and Germany.
“A lot of the players who were playing [on Tuesday night] haven’t played many games of late so the task for them was a little bit harder.
“I think we’ve got plenty of games to get our momentum back.
“We have three preparation games before we go to France so there is plenty of opportunity to regain momentum and learn lessons from [the Netherlands] defeat.”
Despite his disagreement with the award of the Netherlands’ penalty, and his belief that a foul should have been given to his side in the lead-up to the winning goal, Hodgson did admit that he was disappointed England couldn’t build on that jubilant night in Berlin at the weekend.
James Milner captained England against Netherlands
Hodgson added: “I don’t think the decisions were particularly favourable to us. The second one was exceptionally harsh.
“But [they were] given. I was more disappointed that we didn’t reach the level of intensity or creativity that we did on Saturday night.
“I gave a lot of different players a chance to play. I’ve really aired the squad tonight. Hopefully that might be to my advantage in the future.
“I’m bitterly disappointed that we’ve lost a home game at Wembley in front of 82,000 after such a good performance on Saturday night.
“Our domination of the ball didn’t lead to enough goal chances.
“It would have been nice had the referee given the foul for the second goal and we wouldn’t have lost, but I still wouldn’t have been happy.
“I was hoping for a better performance, as were the players, in front of a fantastic crowd.”
England are next in action on Sunday 22 May when they entertain Turkey at Etihad Stadium.
They will host Australia at the Stadium of Light five days later before a Wembley send-off against Portugal on Thursday 2 June.
Tickets for all three matches are on sale now and can be purchased via TheFA.com/Tickets.
England open their Euro 2016 finals campaign against Russia on Saturday 11 June.
