Rivera rejoices at composed Romania

Sito Rivera, Romania coach
Today we played with our heads − that was our goal after the first game. We turned it around from 1-0 down, we tried to fight. We count on 14 players for this reason [Gabriel Dobre being suspended for the quarter-finals]. If we can't play Dobre, somebody else does [his job] instead.

In the first game we lost possession a lot, Croatia played and defended well. It's not normal to lose the ball this much because we have players capable of passing. When we played five against four [with a flying goalkeeper] against Croatia we were bad but against Brazil, Portugal and Spain we've been very good. Today when we went 1-0 down we played with our heads − this was key.

Qualification is down to the players. We played well in the Word Cup [main round] in Italy and now this is the result of our hard work. It's very important to finish the group in first place because if we come second we could play Spain, but it isn't down to us now.

Tomáš Neumann, Czech Republic coach
I don't know [what went wrong, having taken the lead]. We prepared very well for the match but we don't seem able to play against Romania − we haven't beaten them in ten games now. We had a lot of chances but came up short, it's horrible.

[We didn't try the flying goalkeeper tactic] because we still have one match to play. Playing this way is very risky. When we were losing by one goal I tried to play properly but Romania scored and we lost by two. At that moment I started preparing for the next match because we would have been finished if the margin had been three.