England needed an own goal to open the scoring during a laboured 2-0 win over Andorra in their World Cup qualifier on Saturday before Declan Rice made the result somewhat more respectable against the tiny principality ranked 170 places below them.<\/p>\n
A fourth win in four for Thomas Tuchel’s team in their campaign for next year’s finals put them in command of Group K on 12 points ahead of Tuesday’s game in Serbia.<\/p>\n
But their often slow build-up play did not excite the near-40,000 Villa Park crowd and will fuel grumbles that they have become a duller team in nearly a year under German coach Thomas Tuchel despite his perfect record in qualifiers.<\/p>\n
England’s opener came in the 25th minute when a fine cross from Noni Madueke skimmed off Andorra defender Christian Garcia’s head into the net with Harry Kane lurking behind him.<\/p>\n
Rice added the second in the 67th minute when he met another superb cross, from Reece James this time, to steer a downward header past goalkeeper Iker Alvarez to wrap up the victory against 174th-ranked Andorra.<\/p>\n
Andorra, who draw their squad from a population of 80,000, stuck doggedly to their gameplan of packing the defence, often keeping nine men behind the ball and leaving Ricard Fernandez totally isolated up front.<\/p>\n
That gave England a remarkable 83% possession, but the hosts fashioned few clear-cut chances beyond Eberechi Eze forcing a save, captain Kane narrowly missing a toe-poke and Marcus Rashford curling a shot wide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"England needed an own goal to open the scoring during a laboured 2-0 win over Andorra in their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4589,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-4588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4588\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}