Victorious Eilts sets sights higher

Dieter Eilts, Germany coach
After a long, very hard season, it was pleasing to see that the players had the energy to come back so strongly and win the opening match of the tournament. Serbia and Montenegro are of a similar standard to two of the teams we played in qualifying, England and the Czech Republic, but we gave a little bit more out there to win the match and that's what made the difference. We can't now afford to look at the other teams and think what they might or might not do; at this level it is very important to take care of your own team and that's what we'll be doing. We lost a number of players to the senior side but we still have plenty of experienced players who are looking forward to having more adventures in this tournament. We said when we were preparing for these finals that our goal was to win it and that's the dream of my players. It is now my job and that of the coaching team to support them all the way and do what we can to ensure that they achieve those dreams.

Dragomir Okuka, Serbia and Montenegro coach
Obviously I am really disappointed to lose the first match. In these kind of tournaments it is always difficult to qualify when you lose the opener, although we still have two to play and will have to do our best to fix what went wrong. We played as I would have liked at times during the first half but after that we struggled to reach the required level. A lot of people in our delegation expected more from the team today - a number of players are star men at leading clubs but they did not show it. We have to work on changing that as tournaments give you an opportunity to put things right, to change your game plan if necessary. We have the best squad of players here we could have and we'll now give everything to improve for the Portugal match.

Vladimir Stojković, Serbia and Montenegro captain
Congratulations to Germany who deserved the victory. We need to try to fix the areas which went wrong and improve for our remaining matches. We felt before the game that we were the better team and we lived up to that between the 25-minute mark and into the second half. But once they scored we couldn't get the goal back.