
Share
6th July 2018
12:55pm BST

"They were probably the dirtiest team I’ve ever come up against, in respect of when we won the penalty, surrounding the referee, pushing the referee," Stones said. "The head-butt you’ve all seen, scuffing the penalty spot, a lot of off-the-ball things you probably haven’t heard about … all the sort of things that you don’t really hear in a football match. We showed massive character to keep cool heads and not get sucked into their game.England will now play Sweden in the quarter-final on Saturday following the Swedes round of 16 win over Switzerland on Tuesday.“When you play against a team who want to fight, disturb your momentum, you can sometimes get dragged into it. We stuck to our plan, kept playing our own football. "You can see the clips from the game. Some things I hadn’t even seen: the incident with Raheem Sterling and one of their staff … I’ve never seen a game like this before and how they behaved. I thought there could have been several red cards. “If the referee sees the headbutt it’s a totally different game. But the best thing for us was to beat them at football. The biggest thing that’ll hurt them is going back on the plane home. We’re into the next round.”
Explore more on these topics: