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16th August 2016
12:55am BST
Neville tried his best to explain what it was like for him to see England crash out to Iceland and why the hell it happened.
"When you lose to Iceland in a tournament it felt terrible. Shocking. For the players, for Roy, for Ray (Lewington), for myself and for the people there who had worked hard for two years. "You have to remember for two years we'd been pretty good. There was a lot of optimism. We had beaten Germany, we'd done well against Holland and France. We were actually really confident in the build-up. We got wins. We played well in the first couple of games. We played well against Slovakia if we'd have taken our chances. "I think the last 60 minutes against Iceland - I could never explain that to you. "I've watched it back twice and can't explain what happened on that pitch. I've never seen those players before like that in a game. There had never been any inkling that this was going to come. "If you look at where we were during the previous games, we hadn't won against Slovakia or Russia but we kept playing the right way and kept trying to do the right things. But against Iceland it was completely a performance that we hadn't seen for two years."https://twitter.com/kevbeirne/status/765312810335236096 This was the biggest failing in a long line of England failings, which Neville said had been going on with the Three Lions long before 2016, 2006 or even 1996 - back into the '70s and '80s. Hodgson's squad rotation came under fire after England's early exit, but Neville defended his decisions and said he wouldn't change a thing.
"Two of the changes I think most people would have said weren't changes. If you remember Vardy and Sturridge came on in the second game and did well, so I think those were changes that were welcome at the time. "So you're talking about four changes. "Walker and Rose had been rotated. We generally felt they would need one game break with the engine they put into the games. So from that point of view I felt it was the right decision. I still believe it was the right decision and I wouldn't change anything, even though it wasn't my decision ultimately but I support Roy in everything he did with those decisions. "From my point of view I had seen England managers play the same 11 players and then us fall off the edge of a cliff in terms of physicality in 2004 and 2006. So actually thinking about having confidence in the squad, you'd say it was a risk - of course it was a risk - but it was a risk in the last actually not changing players and trusting in the squad. We trusted in all the players. "We didn't see a massive difference between Clyne and Walker and the players that came in. It wasn't as though we were dropping Beckham, Gerrard and Scholes. You're dropping players who were coming in for players who were still equally as good."https://twitter.com/kevbeirne/status/765316202478657536
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