Lucy Bronze admits England have not been happy with their performances at the World Cup, but she is convinced the Lionesses will deliver when it matters most.
England only scraped past Nigeria on penalties in the last-16 after struggling during a goalless 120 minutes.
Bronze knows they must raise their level for Saturday’s quarter-final against Colombia, who have been one of the stories of the World Cup.
“Everything that has been thrown at us, we’ve dealt with and moved forward,” she said.
“I don’t see many other teams who’ve had that adversity and, if they had, I don’t think they’ve managed it the way we have. But we are not happy with our performances, we can give more.
“There’s a lot of belief. We’re a fantastic team with highly talented players.
“But the important thing is we got through. There’s no point in playing our best performances in the first games.
“We’ve built on every game, taken something from every game, whether that was the Haiti game which was physical, the Denmark game when we lost our key player in Keira [Walsh], the China game we totally changed the formation, against Nigeria we had a red card.”
England will be without Lauren James after that red card and the Chelsea star now faces a nervous wait to learn whether that automatic one-game ban is upgraded to three for violent conduct.
