The Three Lions scraped into the quarter-finals with a dramatic turnaround against Slovakia at the weekend but Shearer says their football at the tournament has not deserved any praise.

Speaking with fellow BBC pundit Gary Lineker on The Rest is Football podcast: "Positives? They’re through. The result. And, in knockout football, in reality, that’s all that matters.

"But there is so much more to be had from this England team. I mean, would it be wrong of me to say they’ve been rotten for four games – other than 30 minutes?"

Shearer felt that a repeat of the embarrassing loss to Iceland at Euro 2016 was on the cards until Jude Bellingham's overhead kick in the dying moments of normal time spared England's blushes.

The former Three Lions captain said: "It was desperation. It was desperate. They were so bad, it was untrue. I was thinking Iceland – 2016, was it? – 2016 all over again, with much better players. It was that bad.

"England were offering nothing. Nothing at all. And I just couldn’t see where it was going to come from. And then a piece of brilliance."

Lineker felt it was one of the worst England displays he could remember witnessing and likened it to something produced by a set of players who had "just met each other for the first time".

The presenter said: "I can’t remember a performance, aside from the very, very end, where England had been so lacking.

"They had two shots on target in the game and one was a header. But that was it.

"They weren’t cohesive. They were disjointed. They were unbalanced yet again, as we’ve seen many times in this tournament. They played deep, they were apart, the distances from the back four to the front were way too big, they weren’t condensed in their play.

"It was as though they’d just met each other for the first time and gone on a field and tried to play football."