Courtesy: UEFA.com

Reasons to be cheerful

Thursday, 17 February 2005

Portugal and Hungary may be leaving the 2005 UEFA European Futsal Championship but both sides can hold their heads high at the end of the group stage. The saga continues for Spain and Italy after their meeting, with both coaches already looking to tough semi-final encounters ahead. uefa.com rounds up the verdicts on the last day of Group B matches.

Portugal 5-3 Hungary

We had a bad start to the tournament but the way the results had gone, if we had beaten Spain we would have been in the semi-finals. I am not saying Spain and Italy don't deserve to be there but I think that if we had qualified nobody would have said that we did not deserve to be there. We had to work very hard to beat a young, strong team. I think the reason for that is down to some truly great goalkeeping. (Portugal coach Orlando Duarte)

We are not dispirited by our performance because we came here with the aim of playing against the best in the world and trying to give them some close matches. It was our first time in a European Championship and we have learned a lot so know what we would like to do is to continue to gather this sort of experience. In our last game we had some moments where we showed our lack of experience especially in the final phase of the match. We led three times but lost so we have a lot to talk about in terms of learning to deal with certain situations. This will be of great use to us in the future. (Hungary coach Mihály Kozma)

Spain 1-3 Italy

Coming in first or second place meant the same thing to us. Russia [who Italy meet on Friday] and Ukraine are two very strong teams and for this reason, there is no particular satisfaction in the win. Today we had 5,000 people to watch our match, I thought [waving to the crowd at the end] would be good to say thanks for all this support. (Italy coach Alessandro Nuccorini)

We have to congratulate Italy because today they have been better. [Semi-final opponents] Ukraine are a very tough team - they come from the 'eastern school'. They play very fast and they have [Serhiy] Koridze who is a very good player. Also, we are very happy that they are going to play in yellow and we will treat them with the same respect that we would Brazil. (Spain coach Javier Lozano)