Italy legend Gianfranco Zola, who was at the game for BBC Sport, was particularly impressed with the Charles brothers, midfielder Shea and goalkeeper Pierce, who he described as “brilliant”.<\/p>\n
“This national team has a very good future, they have potential and they need to keep growing and improving,” said the former Chelsea forward.<\/p>\n
“When they get something more in the final third of the pitch there will be a big improvement.”<\/p>\n
Those are big words from a player and pundit of Zola’s stature, and O’Neill echoed those thoughts. <\/p>\n
He described 20-year-old Sheffield Wednesday stopper Pierce, who missed the entire group campaign through injury, as “magnificent”, and felt Shea and fellow midfielder Ethan Galbraith “could both play at a higher level” than Championship clubs after impressing against Tonali, Manuel Locatelli and Nicolo Barella.<\/p>\n
O’Neill said he could praise every player in his team for how they adapted on a big stage.<\/p>\n
“The saves that he made at key moments, but his [Pierce’s] decision making was excellent,” he added.<\/p>\n
“He doesn’t bring any pressure on to his back three, which I think is rare in a goalkeeper of that age. He’s got a brilliant temperament.<\/p>\n
“There were great performances all over the pitch tonight, but Pierce in particular had a very strong performance.<\/p>\n
“The difficulty, as I say, is having depth in our squad to deal with when players are not available to us – and that’s something that will take a bit of time.<\/p>\n
“There’s no way to fast track that. We just have to be patient.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Italy legend Gianfranco Zola, who was at the game for BBC Sport, was particularly impressed with the Charles…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":497851,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-497850","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=497850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497850\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/497851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}