It’s unlikely that James will be able to have as free a role as that when England take on Spain. This is a game in which the Lionesses are going to have to be extremely disciplined, as they’re likely to have less of the ball than their opposition, despite being the home team.<\/p>\n
That is how it played out when the pair last met at Wembley, with England defending brilliantly and being extremely efficient with the ball to win 1-0, posting an expected goals statistic of 1.69, just less than Spain’s 1.93. <\/p>\n
James played a key role at both ends, causing problems in attack with four shots on target while putting in a great defensive shift, winning four ground duels.<\/p>\n
“I think the biggest step she takes is that, in defence, she’s working so hard and she’s doing so well,” Wiegman said afterwards. “That’s a massive, massive improvement. I’m proud that she’s doing that.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It’s unlikely that James will be able to have as free a role as that when England take…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":890697,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5008],"tags":[11246,748,393,109337,126,4884,86038,16,15,13582,30157],"class_list":["post-890719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-england","tag-analysis","tag-britain","tag-england","tag-england-vs-spain","tag-features","tag-great-britain","tag-l-james","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-womens-football","tag-world-cup-qualification-uefa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116396258198302420","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=890719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890719\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/890697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=890719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=890719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=890719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}