Yahoo News Euro 2016 Steve McManaman exclusive: England's 'route of death' is entirely their own fault
Yahoo Sport's expert analyser Steve McManaman has no sympathy for England for wasting a golden chance to claim an easier path to the final
England may believe they struck the jackpot when they landed a Euro 2016 last-16 tie against Iceland on Monday, but a harsh reality must be that this competition has already gone a little wrong for Roy Hodgson and his team.
Wales emerged victorious from a pretty dour all-British clash against Northern Ireland in Paris on Saturday, which is the game England should have been playing in, if they had not made such heavy weather of their group stage matches.
Now, without question, they find themselves in the wrong half of the draw and they only have themselves to blame for that.
Collecting five points against average opposition in Russia, Wales and Slovakia had to be seen as a disappointment for England while there was a suggestion they have ‘got lucky’ by being paired with Iceland, I would suggest their chances of winning Euro 2016 has already taken a big blow.
England will probably need to beat two of France, Spain, Italy or Germany just to get the to final of Euro 2016 and that will be a big ask for a young team lacking experience of winning matches in the latter stages of major events.
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Hodgson and his players have been fortunate to get a very average Iceland side in their next match and while it might not be as easy as win as many suspect, they will get through to the quarter-finals, where they will need to stand up to be counted.
Having travelled around France for the last couple of weeks and witnessed some less than inspiring matches at Euro 2016, I cannot wait to get to the stage of the tournament where the big teams start to play each other.
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Only then can we get to the point where we can see which team might lift this trophy because up to now, it has just been sparring between the teams.
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The format of allowing the best third place teams to qualify diluted the group stages to a large extent, which was no surprise as it was always likely to be the scenario of the expanded European Championship set-up.
To be honest, some of the matches we have seen so far have been painful to watch, as teams were happy to settle for a point too often, safe in the knowledge that they were more than likely to get through one way or the other in the final analysis.
We have ended up with a lop-sided competition that sees a host of major nations in the bottom half of the draw and a set of underdogs in a top half, with one of the teams in the top half presented with a golden chance to go all the way to the final in Paris on July 10th.
Things are about to get interesting at Euro 2016 and about time too.
