Steven Gerrard has admitted that England did not deserve to beat Israel and acknowledged that he and his teammates are now underdogs in the fight to reach the Euro 2008 finals.
A goalless draw here on Saturday night resulted in Steve McClaren’s squad falling further behind Croatia and Russia in Group E and Gerrard admitted they had paid a high price for their failure to brandish a sharper cutting edge against the Israelis.
”To be honest with you, it feels like a defeat,” the midfielder confessed. ”We have kept a clean sheet and limited them in chances on our goal but I think we have lacked a bit of cutting edge and a bit of sharpness in the final third to deserve a victory.”
England have now found the net just once in their last five matches and Gerrard admitted he was at a loss to explain how a side studded with big name players had produced the country’s worst goal drought in 26 years.
”I can’t put my finger on it,” he said. ”We have got players who can score goals. You see that week in, week out in the Premiership but we have struggled over the last four or five games in front of goal so that is what we have to do moving forward, we need to improve in the final third.
”You can’t just put the responsibility on the strikers. It is down to myself, Lampard, Lennon and other players to help the forwards score goals.”
Although England have made life complicated for themselves, Gerrard believes they can turn their situation around.
”I think it looks that way but a few victories can soon make that table look different. If we can put a few wins together we can turn it round.”
The Liverpool captain admitted it had hurt to hear England fans chanting ”What a load of rubbish” but said he understood the reaction of the travelling supporters.
”We have not scored in the last four or five games and we are not winning games we should be winning.
”It is not nice but these fans are travelling all over the place, giving good money and they want to see goals, they want to see us beating the likes of Israel and Macedonia and we are not producing so we take it on the chin.”
Gerrard’s comments were echoed by his clubmate Jamie Carragher.
”We probably didn’t create enough really,” said the defender who came closest to scoring for England with a second-half header that clipped the top of the bar.
”From a defensive point of view they never really caused us many problems and obviously they were quite happy with the draw. It was up to us to break them down but we had problems doing that.”
Bayern Munich midfielder Owen Hargreaves said England had to get back to scoring and winning against group E minnows Andorra on Wednesday.
”When you look at the group now we are obviously on the back foot and we need to step it up a gear,” said Hargreaves.
Frank Lampard insisted England could still regain control of their own destiny with home matches against the top two in the group still to come.
”We can’t be negative and worry about it and put our heads down,” he said. ”We have to approach it in a positive way and win the games that will get us there.
”We are realistic, we know we have a lot of work to do. We will have to win a big proportion of our games if not every game from now on. But we have the players and the squad to do that and now it is important that we stand up and be counted.” – Sapa-AFP