Lionesses ready to show their teeth says Lucy Bronze

The European champions crushed China 6-1 in their third group-stage contest, but that match remains an outlier in a tournament that has otherwise seen them score just one other goal from open play.

That winning strike came against Denmark from Lauren James, who will miss the Lionesses’ last-eight encounter while she serves at minimum a one-game suspension after she was sent off in Monday night’s last-16 victory over Nigeria.

“We can give more,” vowed Bronze. “We’re a fantastic team with highly-talented players, but the important thing is we got through to the next round.

“There’s no point in playing our best performances in the first games, we might as well save them for the quarter-finals or further than that.

“We’ve built on every game, we’ve taken something from every game, whether that was the Haiti game that was physical, the Denmark game when we lost our key player in Keira [Walsh], the China game we changed the formation completely, [Monday] we had a red card.

“Everything that has been thrown at us, we’ve dealt with and moved forward.

“I don’t see many other teams who’ve had that adversity and if they had, I don’t think they’ve managed to overcome the way we have. At the same time, we are not happy with our performances.”

Bronze added: “All we can do is go back to training and make sure we are focused on the job at hand. The most important thing is that we’re coming out of games with wins.

“I think I said that after the Haiti game, and some people thought that was not probably what they wanted. However, we’re the ones who are still in the competition and there’s many top teams who are going home because they haven’t been able to get that point or been able to see the games out in the penalty shoot-out and we have.

“We’ve shown that side of our team that we know what it takes to win.”