Rice blasts England armchair critics

Declan Rice has warned his England teammates that they can not get too ahead of themselves but has blasted armchair critics who wrote off the Three Lions.

Speaking to BBC afterwards, Rice said: “We don’t want to get too ahead of ourselves. Saturday is a big game now, we travel to Rome and we want to win that and progress into the semis.

“All I can say about today is the fans, the players, how we were up for it before the game – I’ve not been a part of a team with togetherness like it. We believe we’ve got the quality and we really believe that with the tournament at Wembley we can keep progressing.”

Rice also made reference to armchair critics who had doubted England’s ability to progress in the tournament.

“A lot of people, if you look at the group stage, had written us off for not scoring enough goals. You read a lot of it then put it to the back of your mind and want to prove people wrong. Tonight everyone had that fire in their belly. For one, knock Germany out and, two, get us through to the next round.

“It’s history – all the players have been asked about the previous games with Germany but today we created our own bit of history. Gary Neville was saying these things don’t come round often and we took the most of that opportunity and it was a pleasure to be out there..

Claretandhugh says: Strong words from the fella and it’s great that he and the squad are determined to prove the critics wrong. Thus far they have done so beyond the Scotland match and last night the s[ark was probably Jack Grealish who made a big difference on his appearance. There was an alarming moment when the defence opened up like the Red Sea but the usually so on the case Muller missed an outstanding chance. This certainly isn’t as good a German side as past outfits but it was an historic win and we move on. Of course we are pleased – as the critics should be to be proved wrong – but let’s not get too carried away until we actually win a trophy. This may just be the squad to do so. We’ll see.