‘We didn’t help ourselves’ – Wiegman frustrated with sloppy England | OneFootball

England head coach Sarina Wiegman said that her side’s 2-1 defeat to France at UEFA Women’s EURO 2025 was of their own making.

The Lionesses’ title defence got off to a terrible start in Zürich as they were outclassed by a well-drilled French outfit.

Alessia Russo had an early goal disallowed before France got on top and netted twice through Marie-Antoinette Katoto and Sandy Baltimore. Keira Walsh pulled a goal back three minutes from time but it was too little, too late.

When speaking to the media in the post-match press conference, England boss Wiegman did not shy away from the fact that the Lionesses caused themselves problems.

“Of course, I’m very disappointed,” Wiegman said.

“We started well, created a chance in the first minute, scored a pretty good goal that was disallowed.

“After that, we created our own problems a bit by playing short passes all of the time where they could full press. We wanted to skip players and get in-behind them to receive the ball but we were a bit sloppy. We lost balls in those moments and we didn’t help ourselves; it was hard to get out of that situation.

“They scored two goals; one where we were sloppy and we could have created a huge chance but they won it and they scored a goal. That was very unfortunate and of course, we want to do that better.

“Second half, we did it more and tried to get in-behind but we didn’t create that many chances. When we get them, we have to shoot on goal and get them on target. After we scored from a corner, we tried to force a goal and we were close but not close enough.

“Overall, we want to do better and what I’ve just talked through are the big learnings. We need to move on.”

England’s performance declined off the back of Russo’s disallowed goal but Wiegman did not believe that this moment was the reason that the game changed.

She said “I’m not sure it was [because of] the disallowed goal. As I’ve explained, when we built, we chose short passes. They were aiming for that and they were pretty good in midfield, so we had to go around and at times on the right side, we had moments where we had overloads where we could find that.

“We have to skip players and not play the short passes but when you receive them, you have to be tighter on the ball and be quicker to play them out of that press that develops.

“We caused our own problems knowing that when you don’t do these things right against France, they’re a very good team, so they can harm you.”

England take on The Netherlands in a ‘must-win’ fixture on Matchday 2. Wiegman says that the Lionesses will face a very different challenge.

She said “It’s a different team. They’re pretty dynamic and of course, I know them pretty well. They want to play in the pockets and try to change the shape all of the time. They definitely want to have the ball and play but they also want to press high in moments. We will get prepared for that.”

England’s next UEFA Women’s EURO 2025 fixture against The Netherlands kicks-off at 5pm on Wednesday evening.