England and Manchester City Goalkeeper Joe Hart was disappointed by the result which saw him concede two goals, but his excuse for the performance left many fans bewildered and scratching their heads.
Hart who was captain for the night, in the absence of Wayne Rooney, was beaten by a stunning scissors kick by Mario Gaspar, the Villarreal right- back who doesn’t feature regularly in the Spanish first team, and a precise strike by Gunner Santi Cazorla.
In one of the most bizarre excuses for defeat ever given by a captain, he felt that the Estadio Jose Rico Perez, home to Spanish third division side Heracles, had a part to play in their defeat.
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Hart blames ‘third-division pitch’ for loss, optimistic about young players in the team
“It’s strange how we’ve ended up playing on a third-division pitch for a game like England-Spain. It [the pitch] wasn’t good enough but I’m not making excuses. It was just strange to me. I’m upset — I might be talking rubbish.”, he told ITV. according to goal.com.
“We’ve been doing well for a long time now so it’s difficult when we do lose. We had some chances, we were in the game. We’ve lost the game so we need to dust ourselves off and do better against France. We showed when we were brave we did get that one pass and we did break through Spain. We did that on enough occasions and then after that we let ourselves down a little bit,” he added.
Hart was however happy about the influx of youth into the team. “There’s definitely loads to improve but we’ve built a good base. We put people like Dele and Eric a guys who haven’t played many games a out there. I was an old man out there today and I’m 28 years old. So that’s one promising thing but there’s not a great deal you can take from defeats.”
Reality Check For England
The England team was riding the high of an unbeaten Euro 2016 qualification campaign but were quickly brought crashing down by a fluid Spanish side that dominated possession and kept pressing and creating chances. An injury to Michael Carrick added to their injury problems affecting their performance. With the team looking awkward in possession and unable to take the chances they created, it leaves many problems for manager Roy Hodgson to deal with. Despite Hart’s absurd claims, the fact is that both sides played on the same pitch and the Spaniards came out on top.
