Milla delighted by Spain's stroll to last four

Spain coach Luis Milla sees his team on an upwards trajectory at the UEFA European Under-21 Championship after they qualified for the semi-finals with a 3-0 win against Ukraine.

After dedicating tonight's Herning triumph to Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) official Julián del Amo, who died today, Milla explained how his players are getting better and better at this tournament.

Luis Milla, Spain coach
I want to dedicate this victory to the late Julián del Amo, the former Spanish FA delegate who has been an inspiration to all who have worked with him around the senior national team.

My players again showed what they are capable of, moving the ball around to create chances and hurt the opposition. We have the players to produce performances of this calibre. We were thinking only about winning, delivering a performance, staying ambitious and continuing along this path. We weren't thinking about the result in the England-Czech game.

Belarus are one of the top eight teams and will be difficult opponents. Mentally they must be quite strong to have reached the semi-finals. They are also physically strong and tactically astute. But we feel we are getting better and improving the little things. We can hit a new peak against Belarus if we keep this up.

Both the players and the coaching staff are delighted with what we have achieved. In the first game, against England, you are always a bit cautious, against the Czechs we showed more quality and looked relaxed, and today we knew we had to be ambitious – we had to achieve our first objectives of the semis and the Oympics. Spain are fortunate to have clubs that are working in a similar way and producing a particular type of footballer. We have a clear style of play and we give our footballers the confidence to play.

Pavlo Yakovenko, Ukraine coach
I have no complaints about the commitment of my players – especially when you take into consideration that they were up against Spain. You should also factor in the dismissal, but all the same the result is far from being perfect for us. If there were some mistakes then these were made by me. The players gave their all and I'm not ashamed of them. They did well enough.

England, the Czech Republic and then us ... every team in the group tried to do something against Spain. Today we had our game plan and we were trying to show discipline in defence, but you must also consider the great individual quality of the Spanish players. It's not always something you can deal with and today we were the latest to fail. There's always an opponent and they were better. We had ambitions going into this championship but we were up against strong teams.