Harry Kane disagreed with Alan Shearer that dropping too deep was a major problem for England in the Euro 2020 final defeat to Italy.
The Three Lions suffered penalty shootout heartache at Wembley as the resilient Azzurri ended a nation's dream.
Substitutes Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka all missed penalties as Jordan Pickford's two superb saves were in vain.
Gareth Southgate's men matched Italy in intensity for large periods, but ultimately came up short and forced goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma into little action before he became the shootout hero.
Kane failed to register a touch in the opposition box throughout, proving just how much the Three Lions struggled to get their talismanic captain into the game.
Luke Shaw's opening goal inside two minutes came after Kane dropped into a deeper area and switched the ball out wide to Kieran Trippier.
Shearer believes England did benefit from Kane coming deep initially, but hinted that the Tottenham striker failed to adapt as he had such little impact in the Italian final third.
"Harry Kane, there's a balance when you're playing as a forward," Shearer said on BBC post-match.
"In the first half he was causing them problems because he was dropping deep, but he didn't have one touch in the 18-yard box for the whole game.
"It's been a really tough night for him."
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Kane accepted in his post-match interview that England were perhaps guilty of dropping too deep after scoring so early on at Wembley.
But the Three Lions skipper thought his side were in control of proceedings despite their failure to create sustained pressure.
“We’re playing against a very good side," Kane told the BBC.
"We got off to the perfect start. Maybe dropped a little bit too deep. Sometimes when you score that early it’s easy to try and soak up the pressure and try hold onto that and that’s probably what happened.
"They had a lot of the ball, they had a lot of possession but to be fair we looked fairly in control.
"We didn’t create too many chances then obviously they got their breakthrough from the set-piece and then after that it was probably a 50/50.
"In extra-time we grew into the game, had a few half-chances then obviously penalties is penalties. We went through our process. The boys did everything they could, it just wasn’t our night.“
Devastated Kane was optimistic for the future but admitted the defeat would hurt for the rest of his playing career.
"We’re all winners and we want to win so it’s going to hurt for a while and it’ll probably hurt for the rest of our careers but that’s football," he added.
"We progressed well from Russia and now it’s about continuing that. We’ve got a great squad with loads of young players hungry for more football like this so that’s all we can do. Build and learn and hopefully go into next year in a better way.”
