Lucy Bronze is confident that England will win a trophy in the near future, despite another semi-final defeat in the Women’s World Cup.
The narrow, and heart-breaking, 2-1 loss to the USA in Lyon on Tuesday evening was the Lionesses’ third successive loss in the last four of a major tournament, following exits at the same stage of the 2017 Euros and 2015 World Cup.
But Bronze, a key player at all three of those tournaments, believes this team will go one further soon.
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“Of course it’s a disappointment, we wanted to win this World Cup, we came here to win this World Cup and we’ve fallen short,” the 27-year-old said.
“We wanted to make it to the final because we haven’t quite made it there but the fact that we’re consistently reaching semi-finals shows how immense this team is and the strengths of this team.
“Now we’ve got [the Olympics] as Team GB next year and then we’ve got a home Euros.
“There’s so much ahead of us and we can really push on and I know for a fact that this team is going to win a trophy at some point.”
The style of football England have played in this run to the semis has been different to the past, with Phil Neville implementing an attractive, attacking and possession-based philosophy that Bronze has been a key part of.
Despite their manager saying before this game that a semi-final defeat would be a failure, he was incredibly proud of the group, the full-back revealed.
“He just said he was proud of us,” Bronze said.
“He’s proud of the fact that we came to this tournament wanting to play a style of football.
“We’ve evolved from two years ago from the team that we were in the Euros. We’re now playing football and to do that in such a short space of time is such a tribute to all the players that have featured in an England shirt.
“The fact that we went completely 180 on the type of football that we tried to play before and now we’ve got to the semi-finals of a World Cup playing some nice football, scoring lots of goals, I’m super proud of us for doing that.”
Bronze has been one of the stars of the tournament, contributing a goal and two assists from right-back, but she was disappointed with her own display against the USA.
Christen Press opened the scoring after 10 minutes with a header at the back post, and the Olympique Lyonnais defender believes she should have done more to prevent that.
“I was just disappointed with myself, disappointed in the first goal, that’s not something I’m used to, I’m used to being defensively solid,” she said.
“No matter what people say about me as an attacker I always want to defend my player well and I’m disappointed that I didn’t do that to my best tonight.
“But obviously the USA have great movement and you can analyse them as much as you want but trying to stop them and trying to do it in the heat of the moment in the game, unfortunately we didn’t quite do that tonight.
“I’m disappointed in my own performance, I thought I could have played a lot better tonight, a lot higher level than what I showed tonight,” Bronze continued.
“We pushed them right to the edge. We got the penalty, the goalkeeper made a really good save, inches away from a goal ruled offside, but we can’t say ifs and buts.
“The USA won and we’ve got to have huge respect for them.
“We tried our best to play our football, we stuck to the way we play even with 10 men, and I’m super proud of the girls but unfortunately it wasn’t enough tonight.”
England will now take on either the Netherlands or Sweden in the third-place play-off on Saturday in Nice, with kick-off 16:00 BST at the Allianz Riviera.
