\n<\/p>\n
England’s spirits were high after they swept past Croatia with a superb display of attacking football – but this was a sobering brush with World Cup reality against Ghana.<\/p>\n
Croatia were determined to press England and, to an extent, played into their hands, whereas Ghana were happy to sit deep and let Tuchel’s team have the ball for long spells.<\/p>\n
It is in these circumstances that a touch of X-factor is needed to make the breakthrough and England simply did not possess it here.<\/p>\n
Tuchel ran through his options in an attempt to crack the Ghana code, with Saka replacing the disappointing Anthony Gordon, and the Arsenal winger almost fashioned the breakthrough when he forced a diving stop from keeper Asare.<\/p>\n
England finally found some urgency in the closing stages, when O’Reilly held his head in his hands after hitting the woodwork, with Guehi similarly disappointed to see his header smuggled off the line. <\/p>\n
It was all too late in what was, overall, a disappointing display.<\/p>\n
Ghana, ranked 64th in the world, presented a more stubborn challenge than Croatia and England could not come up with the answers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
England’s spirits were high after they swept past Croatia with a superb display of attacking football – but this was…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5157,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5156\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}