England were comfortable winners against Ukraine but missed out on automatic qualification for the Women’s World Cup so must now take the longer route to Brazil 2027.<\/p>\n
Sarina Wiegman’s side needed group leaders Spain to lose or draw in Iceland, but the world champions raced to a 6-1 victory to book their finals place.<\/p>\n
Only the top team in the qualifying group secured an automatic spot, meaning England will have to navigate two rounds of play-offs later this year.<\/p>\n
It is a blow for England, who won five of their six group matches but suffered a damaging 4-0 defeat in Majorca on Friday which proved to be their downfall.<\/p>\n
They responded with a much better performance at Hill Dickinson Stadium in Liverpool as Wiegman made four changes to the starting XI and switched up the backline.<\/p>\n
One of the defenders to come in, Jess Carter, opened the scoring when she headed in from close range, before Georgia Stanway poked home England’s second.<\/p>\n
It should have been a more flattering scoreline by half-time as England missed several big chances, including one for Maya le Tissier, while Lauren James curled an excellent effort against the post.<\/p>\n
The Lionesses did eventually extend their lead when substitute Beth Mead drilled the ball into the bottom corner from a free-kick.<\/p>\n
England finish League A3 as runners-up, below Spain because of their inferior head-to-head record, and will find out their play-off opposition on Thursday, 18 June.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"England were comfortable winners against Ukraine but missed out on automatic qualification for the Women’s World Cup so…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":111210,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-491313","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\/491313","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=491313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}