Wiegman “wants to continue” with a squad of 23 rather than 25 players as the Lionesses begin preparations for the 2027 World Cup, having experimented a little in last year’s friendlies.<\/p>\n
The chop means Liverpool captain Grace Fisk and London City Lionesses defender Poppy Pattinson are not included.<\/p>\n
“What they have brought is really positive, but at the moment there’s some players in front of them,” Wiegman explained.<\/p>\n
England face world champions Spain at Wembley on Tuesday, 14 April (19:00 BST), before travelling to Iceland on Saturday, 18 April (17:30 BST).<\/p>\n
With two wins from their opening matches against Iceland and Ukraine in March, Wiegman hopes they continue to build momentum.<\/p>\n
“We had a very good camp in February and March. The team was in a very good place and there was a lot of energy,” she said.<\/p>\n
“We really stepped up in the final third and in taking out the counter-attacks. That’s risky and how the game develops, the opponent is always getting one or two chances, but we made huge steps forward in that. <\/p>\n
“There was a lot of fun and excitement. Hopefully we can bring that to these games too.”<\/p>\n
England and Spain are expected to battle for top spot in their group, with only one automatic qualification place up for grabs.<\/p>\n
But Wiegman says England cannot write-off opponents Ukraine and Iceland.<\/p>\n
“We know where we are, and we know where Spain are. There has been a lot of talk about Spain but I think in this group we have seen we were 0-0 at half-time against Ukraine – that was a hard one – and Iceland were tough too,” added Wiegman. <\/p>\n
“We have to beat those opponents and we want to beat Spain too. We want to qualify for the World Cup as quickly as possible. <\/p>\n
“You have to get good results against Spain but also win every other game. It’s a challenge and we know that. <\/p>\n
“We know the levels of Spain but they are also very aware of our level. The noise\u2026 it’s excitement.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wiegman “wants to continue” with a squad of 23 rather than 25 players as the Lionesses begin preparations…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":505407,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-505406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505406","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=505406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505406\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/505407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=505406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=505406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=505406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}