England defender Alex Greenwood is hopeful that things will start to ‘click’ for the Lionesses as the Women’s World Cup progresses.
The reigning champions laboured to a tough 1-0 win over Haiti, the fourth lowest ranked team in the tournament, in their Group D opener on Saturday. With Georgia Stanway scoring the only goal from the penalty spot, it is also now four consecutive games without netting in open play.
“There are a few tired legs and tired eyes this morning,” Greenwood told the latest episode of Lionesses: Down Under connected by EE. “But after a win everyone’s happy and we’re just glad we’ve had the first game now as there was a long build up to it. We just wanted to get the first game done.”
Comparisons have already been to England’s similarly slow start to Euro 2022 last summer, when an opening 1-0 win over Austria preceded the 8-0 annihilation of Norway a few days later.
“It’s important not to get carried away with the first game,” Greenwood said.
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“If we look back to the Euros, we won our opening game 1-0 and it probably wasn’t our best performance of the tournament. I think with the first game, the most important thing is just to get the win. We were creating chances and we wanted to stop them creating chances but it’s tournament football, you have to adapt against the teams you play against.
“We’ll look back on the game and the chances we created where we could have done a little bit better. We hold ourselves to such a high standard so we will come away from the game thinking we can do this better or that better. And it is important we look at that, but as the tournament goes on and things click in training those things will come together.
“We’re not getting too carried away, we’re just looking at the small details.”
England face Denmark next up on Friday in what is now a must-win game if the Lionesses are to top the group and book an ever so slightly more favourable knockout route after the Danes bagged themselves a late win in their opening game against China.
Watch the full episode of Lionesses: Down Under connected by EE below
