England's Lionesses face a remarkable conflict of interests against Scotland this week, as the latter know they must lose to qualify for the Olympics.

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• Remarkable turn of events means Scotland must lose
• Sarina Wiegman insists there will be no collusion
• Netherlands can also qualify

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  WHAT HAPPENED?

  England's clash with Scotland on Tuesday has been fraught with controversy since the Lionesses were nominated as the nation to qualify on behalf of Team GB. As a result, Scotland, remarkably, know that this week's encounter must end in a defeat if their players are to have any hope of playing in next summer's Olympics.

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  THE EXPLANATION

  The reason for what could be seen as a conflict of interest comes because only England and the Netherlands can qualify from Group A in the Nations League. England must beat Scotland to qualify, but they must also better the Dutch result by at least a three-goal margin. Therefore, certain Scotland players with aspirations to feature in Team GB could potentially throw the result in favour of England, although this seems an unlikely scenario.

  The Netherlands and Belgium have both beaten England in this stage, while Scotland are bottom of the group. As a result, Dutch manager Andries Jonker gave a diplomatic response, per the , where he insisted his side merely had to keep qualification in "their own hands", although Wiegman maintains that there will be no fix.

• WHAT WIEGMAN SAID

  On the matter, Wiegman pointed towards England's quality and the history between the two sides to refute such a conflict, telling reporters: “I understand the conversations about it, but if you know the history of Scotland-England, then there’s no way that they are going to give away this game. They really want to beat England and we want to beat them of course.

  “The Dutch manager knows about the history and he also mentioned that too, that he doesn’t expect that Scotland will just give it away. And they won’t. And you saw too, that the Netherlands got a 4-0 score [against Scotland], so that’s a big score too, so should I question those things too? Of course I do not. This is football, it’s competitive, we have professional players here. It’s going to be a good game where everyone wants to perform at the highest level.”

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  WHAT NEXT FOR ENGLAND?

  It remains to be seen exactly how Wednesday's game will play out, but one has to think that this lack of sporting integrity in such a massive fixture would never be applied in the men's game – and should therefore not exist in the women's either. The Netherlands, meanwhile, play Belgium on the same evening.

Tags: Futebol
Category: News