Roy Hodgson believes England's youngsters will benefit from their experience with the squad at Euro 2012

Roy Hodgson: England boss believes younger players will benefit from Euro 2012 tournament experience

Roy Hodgson believes the younger members of his England squad will benefit from their Euro 2012 experience.

Hodgson gambled on the selection of Andy Carroll, Danny Welbeck and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain for this summer's tournament in Poland and Ukraine.

While their tournament ended in penalty shootout disappointment in the quarter-finals against Italy, their involvement with the national side at a major tournament will prove invaluable during the 2014 World Cup qualifying campaign according to Hodgson.

"That tournament will stand the young players in good stead," Hodgson, who is due to name his squad for the double-header against San Marino and Poland next week, told FATV.

"We had a lot of young players with us who had virtually no international experience and came off the back of seasons where they hardly played.

"Andy Carroll did not play many games for Liverpool until the very end. Danny Welbeck had not played many games for Manchester United and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain hardly played for Arsenal.

"The younger ones will gain enormously from that tournament experience."

Experience

With Steven Gerrard, Ashley Cole and Wayne Rooney, Hodgson has retained a core of experienced players he hopes will allow England to progress.

"The loss of some key players did affect us (during Euro 2012)," he said.

"Experience and ability is what it is all about at the level we were playing at and I don't think we played anything like as well as I would like to think an England team can play.

"But on the other hand, I thought we showed a lot of other English qualities.

"The team spirit, the workrate, the determination, the desire to throw your body in the way of the ball to make certain the team got a result.

"Going into the Euros my major concern was making sure the environment was right, that the players felt comfortable and were happy to be there.

"I can be very happy with what we achieved in that respect but let's hope we can get to the next tournament and show we are an even better team than we were in the last one."