One of the main reasons for Tuesday night’s results was that only one team from the league phase groups received automatic qualification.<\/p>\n
The Netherlands, 2017 European champions, finished second in their group behind France, ranked sixth in the world. They went on to beat Hungary 11-0 on aggregate.<\/p>\n
Norway, World Cup winners in 1995 and six-time European finalists, lost out to giants Germany in their group and ended up beating Romania 8-0.<\/p>\n
Other League A fallouts Sweden and the Republic of Ireland thrashed their opponents 15-0 and 12-0 respectively. <\/p>\n
So it was no surprise when back-to-back European champions England, who were drawn in the same group as world champions Spain, went on to record another heavy victory against much weaker opposition from League C in their play-off.<\/p>\n
“Of course we wanted to qualify straight away, that’s not the case,” said England manager Wiegman when asked about the qualification process again on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
“For us now, the facts are that we are in the play-offs, we have played Greece, now we’re through, and now we’re going to play Ukraine. That’s what my focus is on.<\/p>\n
“Uefa will review how things are set up and see whether they think it works or it should be better, or different. I don’t think it’s my place now to review that.”<\/p>\n
The Lionesses still have another two-legged tie against Ukraine to play, with the first leg taking place away from home on 1 December and the return fixture at Wembley Stadium on 5 December.<\/p>\n
Ukraine are a side who England beat twice in the league phase by an aggregate score of 9-1.<\/p>\n
It seems absurd that they should have to beat the same team on at least three occasions as part of their qualification process.<\/p>\n
England have won seven of their last eight qualifying matches, scoring 21 goals, conceding just six times, and their only defeat was away from home against world champions Spain.<\/p>\n
They came runners-up in League A3 only on their head-to-head record with the best team in the world – they even beat Spain 1-0 at Wembley.<\/p>\n
England’s overall tally of 15 points in the league phase was beaten by just three other teams – Germany, Switzerland and Hungary. <\/p>\n
Switzerland and Hungary were also in qualifying groups in League B and League C that did not include a single team from the world’s top 45 ranked nations.<\/p>\n
In contrast England, who were seeded in League A, had Iceland – ranked 13th – as a tricky opponent, and world number one Spain in their four-team group.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the main reasons for Tuesday night’s results was that only one team from the league phase…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":882197,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[403,99],"class_list":["post-882196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=882196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882196\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/882197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=882196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=882196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=882196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}