"Unlucky" England still on course says Eriksson

England manager Sven-Goran Eriksson says his team are still on course to qualify for Euro 2004 despite being held to a humiliating 2-2 home draw by Macedonia on Wednesday.

One of England's worst results of the last 25 years left them languishing five points behind Group Seven leaders and World Cup semi-finalists Turkey, who beat Macedonia 2-1 away on Saturday and followed up with a 5-0 thrashing of Liechtenstein on Wednesday.

"Of course they have an advantage," Eriksson said.

"They have played one more game than us, they have nine points and we have only four -- but I think we can win the group anyhow.

"It's a little bit more difficult after today, we have to recuperate those two points we lost in another game.

"But of course we can do it and after two games, the last World Cup qualification was much more difficult than it should be now."

England had only one point on the board after a defeat to Germany and a draw in Finland in 2002 qualifying -- which led to Eriksson's appointment in October 2000.

As for Wednesday's upset, Eriksson's assessment was that England had played well and been unlucky -- though they had also made costly mistakes.

"I think it was a very disappointing result. As a performance I think for long periods we played good football," he said.

"I don't know how many chances we created today - but they were many. The Macedonian goalkeeper was very good.

"Congratulations to Macedonia, they defended with the goalkeeper plus 10 and did it well. And when they won the ball, they came out with a lot of people on counter-attacks.

"The medicine against that is to score first and we didn't do that. And we never got the opportunity to be above them.

"We should have won. We were a little bit unlucky."

But he also acknowledged: "On the two occasions they scored, of course, we could have done better."

Eriksson refused to blame goalkeeper David Seaman for the first Macedonia goal, which flew over his head direct from a corner. "Bad luck," was the Swede's verdict.

Macedonia, ranked 90th in the world, had dominated the early stages against Turkey at the weekend and again showed good technique and a willingness to attack their big name opponents.

"I'm very pleased with what we have achieved tonight with such a young team," said their coach Nikola Ilievski.

"We missed our chance to draw with Turkey last weekend and we learned our lesson.

"But I'm disappointed with the behaviour of the England team at the end -- they didn't shake hands."