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England drawn together with Scotland in 2019 Women's World Cup
England will face Scotland at next summer's World Cup in France, after being drawn in the same group along with Japan and Argentina.
Phil Neville’s side begin their campaign against Scotland in Nice on Sunday June 9, before heading to Le Havre to face Argentina, arguably one of the tournament’s weakest and most under-funded sides, the following Sunday. They then return to Nice to conclude their Group D fixtures against Japan - runners-up at the 2015 World Cup in Canada and the team against whom England’s Laura Bassett scored the ill-fated own goal that re-routed her side to the third-place play-off in which they won bronze.
“Every game has a different meaning,” Neville said. “In the third game, Japan, we’re playing a team that will probably have their sights set on winning the World Cup. England-Argentina has a special historical meaning for us, and then there’s the first game against Scotland.
“If we’re going to to go to a World Cup - I always dreamt about going, but I was never fortunate enough as a player - you want the biggest and best occasions. The Scotland game, for the whole of the UK, is a fantastic fixture to capture the imagination. This fixture, for UK athletes and UK footballers for the next generation, will be one of the best occasions that England and Scottish football have ever had.”
With three groups primed to feature two European teams, it felt inevitable that England and Scotland would be drawn together. Shelley Kerr’s side, well backed by their own federation, boast a host of big-name WSL players, including Arsenal’s Kim Little and Lisa Evans. In qualifying for their first World Cup they are barely recognisable from the side Mark Sampson’s England beat 6-0 at Euro 2017.
Nine cities - Paris, Valenciennes, Le Havre, Grenoble, Reims, Montpellier, Nice and Lyon - will host games next summer at a tournament the general secretary of the French Football Federation, Laura Georges, has already pledged will ensure the French people "feel what we felt in 1998”. The mascot for next summer’s tournament, Ettie, is, eerily, the daughter of the France 98 mascot Footix - but it was a damning indictment of the latter’s parenting skills when she stormed the stage at the draw’s denouement.
The draw gave starring roles to the likes of Kaka, Michael Essien and Didier Deschamps - one of only three men to have lifted the men’s World Cup as a player and manager - who, when asked if he had any advice for Corinne Diacre, the French women head coach, simply replied: “No - she knows women’s football better than I do.”
If England top Group D, they may meet only one other group winner en route to the final, but in any case the draw had done little to sway Neville’s thinking.
Asked if his side could win the World Cup, Neville simply said: “Yes. I think if I stood here now and said we want to go to the World Cup in France and win a bronze medal, I think I would have 28 players texting me saying, ‘You’re not the right manager for us.’
“My players are ambitious and they want to be pushed and challenged. They want to try and win a World Cup, and that’s what I was brought in to do. If you go into a competition wanting below gold, I think you’re going in with the wrong mentality.”
