Georgia Stanway said it is “inevitable” that England will plateau after their huge success and that they need to reinvent themselves to avoid becoming predictable.
The Lionesses came from three goals down in a 4-3 loss to Germany at Wembley on Friday night. They clawed their way back to a more respectable scoreline after a chastening first 30 minutes, with England their own worst enemy as they fell three goals down.
The air of invincibility that has been a feature of Sarina Wiegman’s tenure, the side having won a first major international tournament at Euro 2022 and reached the World Cup final in 2023, has dissipated as teams have started to figure them out. The expectations on the side remain as high as ever though.
“When the expectation is continuous, we are probably not able to live up to it,” said Stanway. “It’s inevitable that at some point you are going to plateau. We have been with Sarina [Wiegman] for four years now so we will get to a point where we can’t continuously win because teams will figure us out and are getting better.
“That’s where we have to work together to reinvent ourselves and change a little bit of tactics, change a little bit here and there and get the one up on the opposition again. As much as teams are evolving, we also have to evolve. We have to continue to make little tweaks to get that one up.”
England host South Africa in Coventry on Tuesday evening in their second of four friendlies scheduled across the international windows in October and November. Wiegman has promised changes to Friday’s starting XI as she tests out more of her squad.
“We will see different faces tomorrow,” she said. “You want more information, I’m not going to tell you, but you will see changes. We want to try out things to see players, connections and, at the same time, with so many games, is to manage the minutes too.”
Wiegman urged people to look at the context when discussing the four goals conceded against Germany, the only time England have conceded four under the manager.
“I would say look at the bigger picture, the game is improving, we’re playing better players too,” she said. “We have tough games all the time, which is good, you’ll be exposed when you’re not doing things right enough. Of course you don’t want to concede goals. We’re looking at how we concede goals and how we improve on these moments. Sometimes it starts with how we keep the ball, sometimes it starts with we want to press high and then when we press high, do we get the trigger moments right? Then the tactics come in and we’re working on that all the time.”
Stanway was in a lighthearted mood. When prodded by a journalist about her comments about spending some time in the analysis room prior to the Germany game, the Bayern Munich midfielder let out a big laugh. “I’ll take the hit,” she said amid the giggles. “But to be fair, I did my best to try to recover from the fact I messed up from the beginning.
“Germany are a top side and we knew that going into it. It was difficult to prepare for because they would have thrown anything at us. We didn’t really know how they would play, their shape, their formation, it took a little while to adapt to what they were doing. After 30 minutes we found our feet and found the shape we wanted to be in and that allowed us to get more on the front foot and counter and get back at the scoreline. Overall, it’s a learning opportunity, we gave them that scoreline with the way that we played.”
