Former England women's player Sue Smith believes the Lionesses will consistently get to the business end of more tournaments, following the World Cup.
Sarina Wiegman's side were beaten 1-0 to eventual world champions Spain in Sydney, Australia, confounding many critics who perhaps doubted their capabilities following the number of injuries they had to contend with.
Smith has just been a part of a campaign from KIND Snacks to create a giant 'Welcome home' banner for the squad, which can be seen from the sky – and now, she's told FourFourTwo that hope is still high for the future and that she expects this team to be competing for major honours in the future – despite their disappointment to lose the World Cup final.
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"We’ve got brilliant young players who are hopefully going to grow together," Smith said. "Hopefully, we can keep the manager – but thanks to her, we can consistently do this now: get to the latter stages of competitions, get to finals, win finals.
"There’s no reason why they can’t. They’ve got that belief now, that winning mentality. I think against Australia, the experience showed through and they just looked controlled. A massive crowd against us and England didn’t care. They quietened everyone and unfortunately, they just came up against a really good Spain side.
"They’ll learn from that: I think it’s a really bright future for this side. It’s a massive learning curve. It’s horrible at the time but you learn from it. They’ll get there. I think if you’d have said before the tournament, where will England finish… I’m super positive but with all the injuries and the retirements, I wasn’t sure what we’d do. It was a tricky group but after that, it depends on who you play. But as we were going, overcoming these challenges, Germany were going out, the US were going out and I thought, ‘We’re going to win this!’
"I think we all knew that Spain were a top-quality side but we have those players who can provide top-quality moments and I thought we could do a back-to-back Euros and World Cup, which would have been incredible. I think it’s a brilliant achievement, though."
KIND Snacks have created a GIANT 'welcome home' message for the Lionesses, visible from the sky as the Lionesses return from their record-breaking performance in Australia. The message, which reads ‘LIONESSES, YOU DID US PROUD’, is visible from a plane at 20,000ft high, and made out of thousands of messages of support from the public, including ex-Lioness Sue Smith.
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