I will announce retirement after World Cup elimination is confirmed – Gerrard

• Posted on June 20, 2014
• by Nana Kwesi Coomson
• Comment

Steven Gerrard admitted England’s defeat to Uruguay had left him at his lowest point and he hinted that he would announce his international retirement once World Cup elimination is confirmed.

Captain Gerrard’s Liverpool team-mate Luis Suárez scored twice in his first game back since undergoing knee surgery to leave England pointless at the bottom of Group D.

Having lost to Italy and now Uruguay, England require a miracle to qualify for the knockout stages. If, as expected, Roy Hodgson’s team go home after Tuesday’s match against Costa Rica, it will be England first three-game World Cup finals since 1954.

Gerrard has suffered World Cup heartbreak with England on two previous occasions, in 2006 and 2010, but claimed going out in the group stage would be his biggest disappointment.

Gerrard said: “I think I need to park that hurt and the feeling I have got and see what happens over the next four or five days, but if you go out in the group stage it will be a very personal low for myself and the team, and I am sure everyone will feel very similar.”

Asked about his England future, 34-year-old Gerrard, who has 113 caps, added: “It’s not the moment now. But as I said before the tournament, I’ll be respectful to you guys [the press], so let’s see what happens over the next four or five days and we’ll talk again.”Gerrard was at fault for both Suárez goals. “It is frustrating,” he said. “We never managed the game well enough when we got the equaliser. We can’t give chances to Luis Suárez because he buries them from that position.“It’s a really tough moment for everyone in the dressing room, but we need to be professional, keep fighting and pray for that [Italy-Costa Rica] scoreline to go for us.“Looking at the two games and how we have performed, we sort of deserve something out of either one of them if not both of them.

I don’t think I am standing here saying we were poor in both games and our game plan was wrong.“I just thought when we got the equaliser today we just needed to be a bit more clever, a bit more cute and a bit more difficult to beat. Maybe accept that going for a point might have been the best option. But they were weak at the back and they were there for the taking. Once we got the equaliser we tried to use the initiative to get the second.

“It is a big learning curve. You can’t give world-class players chances – that’s one thing – and when you are still in the game you need to be more difficult to beat and that was the disappointing thing for me.“They were sloppy goals and we have to take responsibility for that as a team. The first one he’s peeled off onto the back post, it’s a fantastic ball by [Edinson] Cavani.

The second one, I’ve gone to try and get good contact on the ball and I haven’t got good enough contact on it and I’ve been punished for it.”Hodgson conceded England’s early World Cup exit is virtually assured, saying: “Our chances are unbelievably slim. It will depend on Italy winning their next two matches by a good number of goals and us beating Costa Rica by the requisite number of goals.

To be in with a chance of continuing, we really needed a result today, a draw or a victory, and we didn’t get it.”Two chances came the way of Luis Suárez and he took them both, as the top quality player he is, and that’s probably ended our chances of staying in the competition. We came with such high hopes and were not able to deliver, which is a major sadness. I don’t think anyone let me down, the team down, or the country down.

Everyone tried very hard and the mood is very low. It is hard to know what to say.“We are more than disappointed, we believed we could do enough in this game to get a result. Having worked so hard to counter the first goal, I fully believed we would win the game or at least draw the game. We had been in control for such a long period of time.”

-Telegraph