- England beat Switzerland on penalties to advance to the semi-finals of Euro 2024
- Trent Alexander-Arnold scored the decisive penalty in the shoot-out.
- Listen to It’s all just beginning! EUROS DAILY: Harry Kane needs to be out of England’s starting XI – he’s holding them back and it’s time for Ivan Toney or Ollie Watkins
Trent Alexander-Arnold has said “pressure makes diamonds” after scoring the decisive penalty in Saturday’s shoot-out against Switzerland.
Alexander-Arnold stepped up to take England’s fifth penalty with the chance to put his side into the quarter-finals and made the most of it by smashing his spot-kick into the corner of the net.
He sent the Three Lions into the semi-finals of Euro 2024 and the Liverpool man had a message for fans hours after the game ended.
He tweeted that “pressure makes diamonds” with a series of photographs of himself scoring the penalty and a couple of celebrations.
Jordan Pickford saved Manuel Akanji’s shot as they won 5-3 to book a semi-final against the Netherlands in Dortmund on Wednesday.
After the match, manager Gareth Southgate praised his team for finding ways to win.
“There’s what we ideally want to be and then there’s how we’ve needed to find ways to win with all the obstacles we’ve had,” Southgate said.
‘Going back to losing players a couple of months ago, losing players just before the tournament, a different balance in the team, different challenges throughout the whole process, really.
‘But as I said to the players, with England we often start 25 minutes really well, ahead in games and then we get knocked out in the early knockout rounds.
‘We weren’t smart, we weren’t experts in the tournament. This group is different. They keep possession for longer periods.
“We haven’t always got it right. People can always look back and point out things from the games we ultimately lost.”
‘But overall we’ve shown the resilience that tournament-winning teams have had for years and years.
‘Italy, France, Spain… you know, it’s not all about football. They have other attributes and we are showing a bit more of that street nature.
“We want to always be competitive in tournaments. England should be competitive in the coming years. This is a young team, many of its members will be in the team for a long time.
“But of course we want to achieve it now. We’ve never been to a final outside England, we’ve never won a European Championship, so there are two parts of history we’d love to create.”