Hodgson fears ankle ligament damage for Carrick

England still have a few way to go before they can match Spain and mount a real challenge for worldwide silverware, Roy Hodgson has admitted.

Rooney clipped the top of the crossbar and Casillas made his best save of the night from Kane in stoppage time, but it was too little, too late from Hodgson’s men who slumped to their first defeat since exiting the World Cup to Uruguay last June.

England will remain in Spain until Saturday before they return to London for an equally tough test against Euro 2016 hosts France.

The imminent returns of Daniel Sturridge, Theo Walcott and Danny Welbeck will also increase Hodgson’s selection headache for next year’s European Championship finals in France.

The former-Liverpool manager said Carrick has “severely twisted his ankle” and continued to say he feared it was ligament damage.

“But we didn’t profit from it well enough – that’s the bottom line”.

“This is an experience for them”.

Twelve minutes later Spain killed the game off. Cazorla was given space on the edge of the box and he took full advantage, curling the ball in off a post.

“They had to work damned hard and had to come up with something out of the ordinary to breach us”.

Speaking ahead of the friendly game against the Spanish national team, Rooney told reporters that his nation now possesses “the best group of strikers since I’ve been involved in the squad” and many of them are still out injured.

“It’s an important game in terms of preparation and hopefully we can get a result out of it”.

“All I’m saying is what I’ve said about the team and the starting lineup”, he said.

“When you haven’t lost for a long time and suffer defeat, if you are not careful it can really dent your confidence”.

“Suddenly criticism comes from all corners and people listen and they might start doubting themselves”. “At the front we’ve got Wayne and Jamie Vardy, we’ve got Harry Kane and Ross Barkley, there’s combinations there that interest me”. If you’re asking, ‘Are we going to be able to match them in that unbelievably clever passing game?’ Perhaps we can’t. We need to dust ourselves off and perform better against France.

“He would have to recover and be fit for us to play him and the chances aren’t more than 50-50”. What will we have? What will we be doing?’ We gave the ball away and got punished by a fantastic goal and of course we were losing players in midfield around that time.

“That’s for the very simple reason that we’re looking at various combinations”.