Captain Harry Kane says England have fallen short of what they believed they were capable of but is confident that the Three Lions can continue to build the brilliant foundations that Gareth Southgate has created.
Mario Mandzukic’s goal in extra-time meant that England’s first semi-final in 28 years ended in defeat. Kieran Trippier gave England an early lead with a free kick but Ivan Perisic fired in the second half as Croatia football grew into the game.
Kane remains the tournament’s leading goal scorer and has levelled Gary Lineker’s six goal tally for a single World Cup in a brilliant campaign for England, but the skipper admits that they have fallen short.
“It’s been great to get to this stage and we know we’ve done everyone proud, but we want to go on and we wanted to win it,” Kane said after the game. “We felt we were good enough and we felt we could have done that, but we felt a bit short. It hurts.
“The next step is now to go one further, it’s a great foundation we’ve build with the gaffer over the last couple of years and we just need to carry that on but we want more. We’re sad for the fans here and at home. We have to dust ourselves done and be proud of what we achieved and go again in a couple of years.”
England failed to build on Trippier’s fifth minute goal and squandered several good opportunities to go two in front, including one chance that fell to Kane one-on-one but he could not beat Danijel Subasic.
“We’re gutted. We worked so hard the fans were amazing it was a tough game 50-50 game, I’m sure we’ll look back and there’s stuff we could have done better,” said the England and Tottenham forward.
“It’s going to hurt for a while, but we can hold our heads up high. It’s been a fantastic journey and we got further than anyone would have thought we would have. We’ve just got to learn from it.
“We created some good chances being 1-0 up. Maybe we got a little too deep at times and we didn’t get enough pressure at times. It’s a lot of ifs and buts. It’s hard in these games its small margins, it went their way today.
“Until they scored, we was always under the cosh when they scored we picked back up again. There’s a lot we could have done better, they played well and they made it difficult for us. It’s hard to put a finger on it now.
“It shows we can be up there and we can win knock out games we can get to semi-finals.”
