Harry Redknapp

England have another penalty shootout defeat to add to the collection but I think everyone will accept we were second best.

And however close the result looks on paper we know the reality was that we were well beaten in most departments. It's a depressing way to go out as we were dominated by an Italian team that hasn't looked that special at Euro 2012.

There's always a period of soul searching after we exit a big tournament, but we have to look at the performance and act on it at club and national level because we can't accept that this is as good as we are.

In Andrea Pirlo, Italy had a magician on the pitch last night, but England do have one of our own in the shape of Jack Wilshere and that's one reason to believe we can improve in the future.

I wouldn't advocate wholesale change to the England squad as I thought a lot of our best players were the older guys but we need to change our thinking in the Premier League and start producing youth teams that actually want to play football at international level.

Don't blame Roy Hodgson though, he did the best he could at Euro 2012 with limited time. We were hard to beat and well organised, but hopefully now he can change the way England play and that goes right back to the youth teams.

We have got to produce teams who can play the game properly from schoolboy level right through to the senior team. We need to start producing coaches who want to play football.

It is going to be a long-term thing, I'm afraid.

The best team won and there wasn't much England could do about it. They were in a completely different class to us.

It's the same old story in international football, you have to keep the ball and we couldn't do that. Italy dominated possession and, in Pirlo, they had a man who could just run the game. He was on another level to everyone else on the pitch

It was almost complete dominance, and to be fair, I didn't see that coming. I didn't particularly rate this Italy side - they'd lost three straight coming into the tournament and weren't too impressive getting out of Group C.

What does that say about England then? Well, our failings were familiar as we've seen them time and again over the last few years when England play the best. We can't hold onto the ball and are reduced to containing and defending with our lives. It's hard to see it improving all of a sudden and as I say, guys like Steven Gerrard and John Terry have been our best performers so you can't go getting rid of the older players just for the sake of it.

But something has to change in this country if we are going to build teams who can win at international level.

Teams in the Premier League have to want to play proper football, passing it around properly. Swansea did it last year, and even though they were relegated Blackpool did their best without quite having the players to carry it through.

In Italy they don't have teams who just lump it up the pitch from back to front. They play their way up there and it's the same in Spain. At the moment we give the ball away too often and just don't play.

So it's over to Roy now. He has four years to stamp his style on the national team and set-up.

And maybe with Wilshere to the fore and a few of the old guard around him he can do it.

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