Resilient England do Marley proud

Mo Marley, England coach
It wasn't an emphatic win, in fact it was a very tight game. It was a cautious kind of game for us, but a different scenario [for Denmark]. We knew Denmark's approach would be to go and win, so we knew we had to be sensible, organised and focus on what we do well, rather than worrying about how the groups stood.

The players were absolutely fantastic, I thought they put in a mature performance. They're quite an inexperienced group, but the resilience they keep showing is absolutely fantastic. Teams don't always get the success they deserve, but I think these girls deserve their route to Canada [for the 2014 FIFA U-20 Women's World Cup]. It's been a big objective for us and I'm really pleased for them because their strength as a team in this tournament has been outstanding.

Whatever the players have been asked to do, everybody's applied themselves and most importantly the players have believed in what we've asked them to do. They trust us and we trust what they're capable of doing, and I think the partnership's working well. Collectively we've got the end result: we've qualified for Canada and we're in the semi-finals. Let's see where we can go from here.

I keep saying it but these girls are pretty inexperienced. Only a few went to this tournament last year, none have played at a World Cup, most have never been to a finals, so we're not getting carried away. Our main objective was to qualify for the World Cup and we've done that. We'll recover, we'll see what we've got left and we'll go from there. We've achieved task one, it's now about sitting down and setting a realistic objective about how far we can go.

Søren Randa-Boldt, Denmark coach
My main feeling is that we were the third-best team in this group: England were better, France were better. We never managed to play at a high level at this tournament, so we're disappointed. We lacked some technique under pressure, we made too many mistakes – you can't do that at this level, which is why we're going home. But only seven of our players were born in 1994, which means 11 of this squad are available for next year's competition. Between now and then we'll work on our technique, our physical condition and having a few more skills in one-on-one situations.

These tournaments are very important to the players' development – they really learn a lot. If you asked them right now, they'd probably say they haven't learned much, but they really have. I'm confident we'll do better next year, at least I hope so!