'Incredible news' cheers Okuka

With both France and Serbia and Montenegro qualifying for the last four of the UEFA European Under-21 Championship, there was a mixture of pride and relief in the bowels of the Estádio Municipal de Braga as each side's coach had their say. A 2-0 victory saw France progress as Group A winners with maximum points, while their opponents were reliant on Portugal, as they scored late on to beat Germany, to seal a spot in Thursday's semi-finals. uefa.com rounds up the reaction.

Rene Girard, France coach
The team are obviously playing very well. The team spirit is outstanding and whoever plays, plays well. Even though this team is young, they're playing and behaving with real maturity. It’s been very tough physically playing three games but we have a mental strength too. We have a team which can adapt to different situations and is capable of playing at any tempo. I would like to avoid Italy in the next stage and maybe save them for the final. Ukraine are strong physically and Denmark have proved their quality. We now enter a new competition, a new phase, and we maybe have a slight advantage in that we finished first and will play the runners-up from the other group. We have quality footballers who are technically very good, but the secret of our success here is that we’ve been able to perform together as a team.

Dragomir Okuka, Serbia and Montenegro
The result is irrelevant because the most important aspect is that we’re in the semi-finals. We played really well against Portugal and that performance has directly influenced our qualification. France were better than us today and we can’t be satisfied with that. We can find a lot of excuses and explanations for not playing well but the simple thing is we have to play better. When we left the pitch it was 0-0 in the other game but as we started to go down the tunnel to the changing room there was a huge cheer which was incredibly good news for us. We can’t think about who we might or might not play in the semi-finals, we just have to concentrate on rediscovering the level we played at against Portugal.