Spain ecstatic as dramatic victory sinks in

Spain forward Verónica Boquete found it difficult to describe her emotions after she followed an extra-time penalty miss with the tie-winning goal during her team's dramatic 3-2 UEFA Women's EURO 2013 play-off second-leg victory against Scotland. Her coach Ignacio Quereda admitted he was relieved with the game's outcome despite his side struggling to stay true to their style. His opposite number Anna Signeul said her squad have plenty to build on after their second straight play-off heatbreak.

Ignacio Quereda, Spain coach


It's a joy to have qualified. During moments like these, many things go through your head. I would have preferred not to have suffered that way. In the first half we tried to remain faithful to our style but we struggled a bit. We lost our balance. We were playing against a rival who didn't make things easy for us.

Football is like that sometimes, it's not always fair but I'm happy overall. Verónica Boquete was an important player who – because of her high level – helped us out a lot. Little by little women's football is forging its way into the consciousness here and is starting to get the attention it deserves. The fact that we have qualified is an incentive to go and gain even more experience. By qualifying, we've returned to where we should be. 



Verónica Boquete, Spain forward
'Strange' is not the word to express how I am feeling at the moment. It's completely inexplicable. You can't imagine what this means to me and to the team, to have qualified like that in such a beautiful way. I'm not sure if winning [with the last kick of the game] makes the taste that much sweeter. We'd have opted for a simpler passage through than that. We knew that in footballing terms qualifying would have meant a huge step for us. It's what we were missing.

Thank the heavens that we got the win in the end because had we not, we'd be sitting here now with very different expressions on our faces. We have a lot of work ahead of us looking towards the finals. We want to get as far as we possibly can. 



Adriana, Spain forward


A footballer will go through very few moments like that in their career. We didn't expect to suffer as we did tonight. We have been fighting and fighting to qualify for so many final phases of tournaments and have so often been left standing at the gates. This will lift us to another level. We know we have great players and a great team. We have turned our dream into a reality by qualifying and once at the finals we will be eager to do as well as possible.

Anna Signeul, Scotland coach 


I think we deserve to be going to the finals in Sweden after tonight. I didn't want qualification for myself or for Scotland, I wanted it for the players. When we scored the first and even the second goal I knew that they could still come back. I can't say that we have been lucky in these two games. On the other hand I think that Spain have been lucky. We have a very good young and promising team.

I told my players afterwards that I was very proud of them and that they did fantastically well in this campaign. We don't have many older players but I told the ones that we do have that they can't stop now, that they need to continue until we qualify for a tournament. The next thing is to look to try to get to [the FIFA Women's World Cup] in Canada in 2015. We have an average age of 24 so this team is just going to get better and better.