Georgia Stanway sends Lionesses brutally honest message ahead of Euro 2025 must-win

Georgia Stanway and her England team-mates know the size of the task facing them on Wednesday, and the Bayern Munich star says the Lionesses will deserve to go home early if they can’t get the result they need against the Netherlands. Sarina Wiegman's team suffered a painful 2-1 loss against France in their opening game at Stadion Letzigrund in Zurich, and will return to the scene of the crime for their second group match.

Defeat would almost certainly spell the end of England’s campaign, while a draw would leave their fate out of their hands, but Stanway didn’t beat around the bush when she spoke about the task at hand. “It’s reality. If we’re not good enough on Wednesday then we don’t deserve to continue in the tournament,” she said.

England struggled with France’s wing play in the opening group game, with Delphine Cascarino and Sandy Baltimore thriving but Stanway recognises Wednesday’s opponents will offer a different kind of test. “I think if you look at the Netherlands they play a lot of midfielders, so maybe they’re more likely to come inside then they are to go outside," Stanway added.

“I don’t know if that’s going to be the case, obviously you don’t know until the game. But yeah, they play a lot of midfield players which is going to overload the central areas, so I guess we just have to see what the game brings.

“But in terms of what we can control, of course we want to be better on the ball, but we can control our mentality going into it and we can control our emotions on the pitch. I think we need to demand more from each other, we need to communicate in those moments, and communication isn’t just about speaking but it’s about action.

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“If you put a tough tackle in or if somebody’s doing the run for you or if somebody’s running back or pressing forward, those are the little triggers we can almost use as catalyst moments.”

England had won their opening group game at their previous four major tournaments, with Stanway herself scoring the winner against Haiti at the 2023 World Cup, and she wants to lead by example in an effort to rebound this time around. "What we want going forward is to make actions and stop talking,” she said.

“I didn’t want to do the press conference today because I’m fed up of talking now. It’s time that we focus and we want to put things right on the pitch in order for us to be able to talk. We want to create action from what happened on Saturday and the only way to do that is the game.

“We want the game to come around as quick as possible. We want to make change. We’ve spoken about wanting to be ‘proper England’ and going back to what we’re good at and our traditional style of football – tough tackles and remembering why we’re here. Sometimes it’s about blocking out the noise and getting on the pitch and getting stuck in.”

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