England News

• Nickname:Three Lions
• Founded: 1872
• Manager:Roy Hodgson

• Ground:Wembley Stadium
• Capacity:90,000

Consistency the key for Rio

16 Oct 2007 - 08:29:43

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Manchester United defender Rio Ferdinand believes England's recent consistency will be vital when they take on Russia in Wednesday's Euro 2008 qualifier.

Steve McClaren's side have beaten Andorra, Estonia twice, Russia and Israel all by a 3-0 scoreline in their last five qualifiers and are now in pole position to qualify for next summer's finals in Austria and Switzerland.

An upbeat Ferdinand said: "The consistency is creeping back, but we've still got much to do.

"The game in Russia is going to be very important and to win that we've got to apply ourselves right, take all the negatives out of the environment we're going into over there with the (artificial) pitch.

"We have to completely wipe that out of our minds. If we dwell on that, then we've lost before we even go out there.

"If you sit and think about it (the surface) too much, we are going to be feeling negative before the first whistle goes. We have trained on an artificial pitch this week at times already so we know what it is about."