Kane: We can go one better next time
England captain Harry Kane was left bereft after the dream of World Cup final glory ended in Moscow last night.
Kane looks likely to win the Golden Boot, with six goals in the competition so far, but that is not the trophy the Tottenham star craved.
Despite the agony of a 2-1 extra-time semi-final defeat to Croatia, striker Kane sees good signs for the future under Gareth Southgate and he said: “This shows we can be up there, win knockout games and get to semi-finals.
“The next step now is to go one (step) further.
“We’ve built a great foundation and we’re proud of what we’ve achieved – but we want more.
“We have to dust ourselves down, be proud of what we’ve achieved and go again in a couple of years.”
On the defeat, he said: “It’s tough. We’re gutted, we’ve worked so hard and the fans were amazing. It was a tough game, a 50-50 game.
“I’m sure we’ll look back at stuff we could have done better, but we worked as hard as we could.
“This will hurt for a while, but we can hold our heads up. It’s been a fantastic journey but we’ve got to learn from it and take what we can.
“We created some good chances, being 1-0 up we got a little too deep at times and didn’t get enough pressure on the ball.
“There are lot of ifs and buts. In a lot of games, it’s small margins and it went their way.
“Until they scored we were always under the cosh, then when they scored we picked it up again. But they played well and made it difficult for us.
“It’s been great to get to this stage, but we wanted to go on and win it. We felt we were good enough but have fallen just a bit short.”
England are likely to make a host of changes for Saturday’s third-place playoff against Belgium.