Defender and captain of the Slovak national team Milan Škriniar told what he expects from the match of his national team with England in the 1/8 finals of Euro-2024.
Milan Škriniar"We are of course happy to have made it out of the group and are now looking forward to the match against England. This team was one of the favorites to win before Euro 2024 and still is. But I believe that we will create problems for England and take the chances that we will have. We must try to play our soccer game, take our chances. Our whole team believes that we can surprise them.
The quality of our defense in this match will be important, but the key point for us will be to play our own soccer. It is useless to close in our half of the pitch - in this case England will score sooner or later.
We are now much more dangerous for opponents than before. Even the English will come to the match with respect for us. We beat the Belgians, which probably nobody expected. They will definitely take that into account. We have the weapons to beat England. Everyone realizes that this opponent is better than us in terms of personalities, but as a team we are already better.
The English will definitely be under a lot of pressure as they are only expected to win. Perhaps this will play in our favor, because we don't feel any pressure at all.
Before the tournament, we were the team that had probably the lowest percentage of chances to get out of the group. But now everything has changed. Already after the match with Belgium, in which nobody believed in us either, people and soccer Europe began to perceive us differently. I believe that we will be a dangerous opponent for England.
We have to be brave, play our own soccer, impose it on the opponent, so that he can't realize what he has in mind. The English must know that against them will be a team that knows what kind of soccer it wants to play," said Shkriniar during a press conference.
