BY AYODELE ODUMADE AT WEMBLEY STADIUM

The England manager Gareth Southgate paid tribute to his team as well as the fans after they came from behind to beat Croatia and qualify for the European Nations League semi final. He said: “I am hugely proud of all of the players and the staff because we have grown together. We have improved every step, today was another big occasion, big experience, plenty of pressure on the game but they coped with it really well. We played so well in the first half and had good chances. We should have been ahead in the game. We had to show another side of the gam the resilience the character. It may be the new England but we scored from a long throw and a free kick so maybe nothing changes. The most pleasing thing for me was the connection with the fans because I have not head the like that for years. We have given our supporters some really memorable days and nights. We want to continue that and build on that because the energy that came back into the team helped us to get over the line today.”

This was a tough group to come through and this is a really significant moment for us. The quality of the performances and the depth of the squad has emerged. We had real options on the bench today to be able to come on and change the game.” 

It is a big shift over the last couple of years and I am very pleased. We talked about the fact that it might take 95 minutes to win the game but we scored before then and also had some maturity to see the game throu

The Croatian head coach Zlatko Dalic said: 

“I would like to congratulate England for qualifying for the finals of the European Nations League. We did not get into the England half in the first half. I am not sad though. 

I would agree that our biggest problem was that it was difficult for us to recover from the Spain game. We do not have a big roster of players. England did not trouble us but we lacked concentration to due to the previous game against Spain. The players were very sad after the game. They were leading here at Wembley but that is football. In the big picture there is the law of averages. We are not a big country we do not have great infrastructure but we have reached great heights and achieved so much.”

Our first goal for this competition was to prepare us for the European Championships qualifiers and to use new players. We know we will have full stadiums during the qualifiers. Personally I have high ambitions. We will see what happens in the future. I think England showed at the World cup, they have exceeded expectations and yes it is coming home soon. 

We did not have many solutions on the bench. If you look at England they had players who cost millions of dollars. We only had under 21 players on the bench.”

Andrej Kramaric scored for Croatia via a deflection, while Jesse Lingard came off the bench to equalise for England. Captain Harry Kane scored the winner for England in the 85th minutes.