Pauw revels in penalty foresight

Netherlands coach Vera Pauw had trouble describing her emotions after her team put in a dogged defensive display to oust France 5-4 on penalties to set up a semi-final meeting with fellow UEFA WOMEN'S EURO 2009™ hopefuls England on Sunday. The 46-year-old was nonetheless proud of her side's thorough spot-kick preparations, with opposite number Bruno Bini still adamant that penalty practice would have made no difference following 120 goalless minutes in Tampere.

Vera Pauw, Netherlands coach
I thought after winning the [qualifying] play-offs that I'd never feel this feeling again. The moment we won in Spain and knew we were going through to the finals, I thought that would excel everything – but this was indescribable. There's only two days between this and the next game. We can't let ourselves go because we want to do something against England, so we have to get the players down again. But I'm so proud of them. We did prepare [penalties]. We prepared before the Spain games and at every training session we take penalty kicks. And we've had two or three sessions all week because we knew it could come down to that and most of our players never take any penalty kicks. Last night, we took a whole series with two teams against one another and all the players had to walk all the way towards goal. And we used statistical research from a Norwegian researcher on how to take penalties. I won't describe what he said because we may need it again. I'm glad I didn't have a heart-rate meter around my chest, especially when we missed two match points. It felt like a tennis match and the third time I thought: "It has to be." The French helped us a little bit too. Reaching the semi-finals means the players will now get a salary from the government. The main thing is they can be pro players for the next [year]. That's tremendous, and it means we can train more.

Bruno Bini, France coach
Whether you work on penalties or not doesn't matter, because taking penalties after 120 minutes is a lot different to taking them in training. Also, there is the crowd and the opposition goalkeeper to take into consideration, so it's a lot different to what you can work on in practice. It's cruel and unjust, but that's football. We could have played ten years without scoring any goals against this defence. [On the positive side], we got out of our group, which wasn't easy. We have a young team, so we have a good future. We just want to go back home now because the girls are so sad. But our sadness matches the joy of the Dutch and that's how tournaments work. We wish the Dutch good luck for the rest of the tournament.