Favourites hype won’t leave England on ‘pink cloud’ says Wiegman | OneFootball

England demolished current UEFA Women’s EURO champions The Netherlands 5-1 at Elland Road last night but head coach Sarina Wiegman says that her team will not be getting carried away with the hype from outside of the group.

The Lionesses are many people’s favourites for this summer’s EUROs and last night’s result in Leeds will have only strengthened those opinions.

When speaking in the post-match press conference, Wiegman said that her team will not be getting carried away with the hype from outside of the group and they won’t be sitting on what she calls ‘a pink cloud’.

“We’ve spoken about that (not paying attention to the favourites tag) a lot already,” Wiegman said. “I think there are many favourites for this tournament and we are one of them. We know where we want to go to and we stick to our strategy and our plans.

“Regardless of if we win or lose, we are not going to sit on a pink cloud, we stay grounded. Even if we had lost the game, we still know what we do well, what we can improve on and we take the next step in our style of play.

“The expectations will go higher but now is a moment and we also had that in the Arnold Clark Cup. I think we are in a good place but we still need to improve a couple of things and we know that.”

Reflecting on the 90 minutes, Wiegman was very fair in her assessment of England’s performance. The Lionesses struggled in the opening 45 minutes before kicking-on in the second half from a game-changing moment.

“It was a very good match,” Wiegman said. “We had a hard time in the first half, I think The Netherlands did very well and we didn’t play to our strengths and we were struggling.

“I think we played a very good second half, the Netherlands missed the penalty then within a minute, we scored to make it 2-1 and we could speed up the game, bring the game to a higher level and we scored two more goals.”

England complete a trio of UEFA Women’s EURO 2022 warm-up matches with a fixture against Switzerland in Zürich on Thursday.