HERAKLION, Greece -- Sarina Wiegman said Ella Toone's impressive response to being dropped and her return to form saw her force her way back into the England squad after she was a late call-up ahead of the Lionesses' match with Greece in Crete on Friday night.
Lucy Bronze was ruled out on the eve of Friday's World Cup playoff match with what's been described as a small injury. Instead of choosing a like-for-like defensive replacement, Wiegman opted for Manchester United's attacking midfielder Toone, a player who was left out of the original squad when it was named in September.
At the time Wiegman said the decision was based on form and said both Toone and Chloe Kelly had failed to hit their own impressive heights so far this season. Toone bottled that frustration and impressed in United's next match against Liverpool, where they won 1-0.
"It's about me now, I've got to keep working hard and use it as fuel to keep getting better," Toone said post-match after the Liverpool game. "I'll use the international break to reset, get my mind focused and then we'll go again."
And that answer, and her form has impressed Wiegman. "I think when I gave her the call, of course it was a hard call, and she was very disappointed, but the first thing she said was, 'Okay, I'm gonna get back, how are we gonna do that?' She has support around her too," Wiegman said. "That answer [after the game] and the way she spoke, I thought that was really good."
Toone was in Spain when she got the call, using it as a chance to reset with family while also working on conditioning. "Getting everything ready to go in Spain, and going there for training, that really impressed me, yeah. Well done, I would say."
And when asked why Wiegman went for Toone over another defender, Wiegman answered: "Yeah, because I think we have enough defenders, but how we want to play tomorrow, we have enough options on the position where Lucy would play. If we look at the balance of the team, this was the best position."
This was a match England desperately wanted to avoid, but after finishing second in their group behind world champions Spain, they'll need to navigate their way through two pairs of playoff matches to make the World Cup. And with Greece up first, Wiegman wants her team to put in a comprehensive performance on Friday ahead of the second leg in Leicester on Tuesday.
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"Of course that's the main goal," Wiegman said. "We're fully focused on how do we want to play tomorrow, what do we expect from Greece? We've never played them before. They've done well on that campaign too. So we have our game plan ready, being the best we can be, and then we absolutely want to dominate that game tomorrow and win it of course."
England defender Esme Morgan added: "We always approach every game with the mentality that we want to win it and tomorrow is gonna be exactly that. I think we obviously have high expectations of ourselves in terms of the standards that we want to show on the pitch and we have a lot of talent in the team and lessons that we've learned from qualifications. We want to obviously put in as strong a performance as we can and hope that the result follows on from that."