John Stones has described Colombia as “the dirtiest team I’ve ever come up against” , accusing them of verbal and physical intimidation, and praised England for retaining their composure to prevail on penalties.

More than 200,000 people critical of the American referee, Mark Geiger, have signed a petition demanding the last-16 match be replayed, citing the award of Harry Kane’s penalty and the denial of Carlos Bacca’s goal in extra time. That overlooked the official’s leniency by opting only to caution Wilmar Barrios for flicking back his head into Jordan Henderson’s chest and jaw.

Colombia were also quick to surround Geiger to protest his award of a second-half penalty following Carlos Sánchez’s foul on Kane. Their fitness coach, Eduardo Urtasun, attempted to provoke Raheem Sterling with a shoulder barge as the teams retired at half-time, and the physical intimidation is also understood to have stretched to pinching England players out of sight of the officials.

“They were probably the dirtiest team I’ve ever come up against, in respect of when we won the penalty, surrounding the referee, pushing the referee,” Stones said. “The head-butt you’ve all seen, scuffing the penalty spot, a lot of off-the-ball things you probably haven’t heard about … all the sort of things that you don’t really hear in a football match. We showed massive character to keep cool heads and not get sucked into their game.

“When you play against a team who want to fight, disturb your momentum, you can sometimes get dragged into it. We stuck to our plan, kept playing our own football. You can see the clips from the game. Some things I hadn’t even seen: the incident with Raheem Sterling and one of their staff … I’ve never seen a game like this before and how they behaved. I thought there could have been several red cards.

“If the referee sees the headbutt it’s a totally different game. But the best thing for us was to beat them at football. The biggest thing that’ll hurt them is going back on the plane home. We’re into the next round.”

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