Iceland are the Leicester of Europe. To beat them we need to model our gameplan on the Brady bunch’s blitz of the Azzurri COLLY

THE biggest mistake England can make would be to underestimate tomorrow’s opponents – and go into the game thinking of them as ‘little Iceland’.

Firstly, Iceland is a hugely proud nation. They pride themselves on the great link they have with the original Vikings. Physically and mentally, you will be hard-pushed to find stronger people.

Secondly, they also happen to be a very good team.

Obviously, they’re defensive and they will get bodies behind the ball, just as Russia and Slovakia did.

But look back at Iceland’s qualifying record and you see that they beat Holland home and away, keeping two clean sheets, and recorded victories over the Czech Republic and Turkey.

This is Iceland’s golden generation – and we’d be crackers to look only at the standout trio of Gylfi Sigurdsson (below, right), Aron Gunnarsson and Eidur Gudjohnsen.

Yes, they are Iceland’s more refined players, but if you look at the defensive unit they have overall, it’s sensational. And as we saw in their group games, they’re a very good counter-attacking side too.

They almost remind me of a Leicester City – they’ll say, ‘You know what, we’re not going to out-football these teams, but if we defend well and get the confidence from keeping the scoreline down and keeping clean sheets, then three or four times a half we will ask questions in the opponent’s half, on the counter’.

Possession

So for England it’s going to be another case of us having lots of possession and the question, again, will be, ‘Can we turn that into goals?’

The best way to do that will be to attack them like the Republic of Ireland attacked Italy on Wednesday – with what was very much a ‘British Isles’ tempo.

That means treating minute one as if it’s the last 30 seconds of a game in which you’re 1-0 down. In other words: you go for it from the off.

The worry for me is that England try, perhaps more than the other home nations, to be a little bit more cerebral about their football, almost a bit too continental.

You can see it – for the first 10 minutes the ball goes round the back four, pops into midfield, and it looks great.

But I think the more time an England international has on the ball, the worse it can be for us, because we’re not used to playing that way on a regular basis – it’s a different code in the Premier League, the Championship and League One, it’s about reacting very quickly.

That means the message for England is simple: we go for it from minute one, we throw everything at them, and we should be physically stronger.

We have proved in three games that we can make chances – we just need to be more aggressive and more clinical and we