Substitute Ollie Watkins scored a stoppage-time winner to send England deservedly through to their second successive European Championship final on Wednesday as they finally turned on the style to beat Netherlands 2-1 on a memorable night in Dortmund.<\/p>\n
“I was just trying to describe, when you score, the emotions that come through your body, but this is just a different feel. And it was slow motion when I was running over to the boys and celebrated. I did not want to get off the pitch at the end because I just wanted to soak it all in because it doesn’t happen often, obviously,” the semi-final player of the match said after the game.<\/p>\n
With the match looking set for extra time, Watkins received a pass from fellow sub Cole Palmer and fired a sweet strike into the far corner.<\/p>\n
Xavi Simons had brilliantly put the Dutch ahead after seven minutes, with England equalising 11 minutes later with a Harry Kane penalty. Netherlands coach Ronald Koeman criticised the VAR decision and said judgments like that would destroy football.<\/p>\n
The outcome of the evening was heartbreak for the Dutch, who have now lost four semi-finals since winning the title in 1988 and were hoping to make the final despite finishing third in their group.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The outcome of the evening was heartbreak for the Dutch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":965208,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[225],"tags":[883,1050],"class_list":["post-965207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sport","tag-euro-2024","tag-euro-2024-tournament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elections.sabc.co.za\/elections2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elections.sabc.co.za\/elections2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elections.sabc.co.za\/elections2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elections.sabc.co.za\/elections2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elections.sabc.co.za\/elections2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=965207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/elections.sabc.co.za\/elections2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965207\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elections.sabc.co.za\/elections2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/965208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elections.sabc.co.za\/elections2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=965207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elections.sabc.co.za\/elections2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=965207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elections.sabc.co.za\/elections2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=965207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}