Paul Pogba received criticism for his performance against Switzerland.

The World Cup winners were knocked out of the tournament in an intense penalty shootout by Switzerland.

Paul Pogba made an impressive curler from outside the box into the top corner to secure France’s 3-1 lead in the last fifteen minutes.

He was then criticised for giving the ball away near the halfway line in the build-up to the goal of substitute Mario Gavranovic.

“I thought he was brilliant,” said Andy Cole. “He proved to everyone just how good a player he is. Yeah, you’re still going to have people question him. A lot of people try to blame him for the third goal but I can’t get my head around that. If you lose the ball in their half, trying to create something, and then they run basically half a pitch to score a goal, that means his team-mates didn’t help him particularly well. If you’re going to blame him for that goal… It is what it is, but he proved just how good a player he is.

“You can talk about he gave the ball away, but we all give the ball away. Mbappe missed a great chance when he should have gone inside on his right foot – has anyone mentioned that? It’s a Paul Pogba thing, I think. It was definitely a brilliant penalty too – he did everything well last night.

“I think he’ll be bitterly disappointed. Like you said, with the performance he put in as well, I thought he was brilliant. I listened to some of the comments and people were trying to [laughs]… I genuinely believed football was a team game. I genuinely did believe there were 11 players out there.

“We can all sit here and pick up on people’s negatives and what they didn’t do. Let’s talk about his positives and what he did do. France have gone out, yeah, and were the better team. But, when it goes to penalties, it’s a lottery and they weren’t good enough on penalties.”

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