Three games, three wins, three points - the U20s women’s side have qualified comfortably for the U20s World Cup quarterfinal. After wins against Venezuela (3-1) and Mexico (3-0), coach Maren Meinert’s side also came out on top against South Korea (2-0) and DFB.de has all the reaction to the final group stage game below, as the players look ahead to the first knock-out encounter against France, which will take place on Friday.
Dina Orschmann: It was a dream, I can’t describe it any other way. It was really unbelievable how we stuck together today and how everyone fought for one another. It was a great joy to be on the pitch with this team. With the goal to make it 1-0, I just thought, I’ll run through the centre and pull the trigger – then it went in. Running to the bench after was just a reflex; I was so happy and wanted to go to my sister (her twin sister Katja Orschmann is also in the U20s squad). In that moment I just felt pure happiness, I also wanted to thank my coach who told me I should be brave.”
Maren Meinert: I think we did very well today, above all defensively as we were very aware and didn’t let South Korea into the game. What’s more, we took advantage of our chances and used the whole pitch - I'm very happy. I expect an open match against France, we’ve already played good games and now we have to recover as quickly as possible and prepare for the quarterfinal.
Rebecca Knaak: We’re very happy with the performance of the whole team. Everything went well and like we planned and this meant we played a good game. We deservedly won and are of course looking forward to the quarterfinal, it was our goal to still be in the tournament at this time. We’ll now recover and prepare as well as possible, France have a similar playing style to ours so it’ll definitely be an equal game. Again, we’ll give 100% to win.
Stefanie Sanders: We performed very well as a team today. You could feel how very much we wanted to advance to the next round and we did everything for the team. The fact I scored and was given the Player of the Match award makes me very happy – it’s an honour. But of course I'm even happier about the game and our deserved passage into the quarterfinal.
Saskia Matheis: It was a class team performance, we got stuck in and gave everything till the end – you could see that. We first learned that we’ll face France in the quarterfinal after the game, it didn’t play any role before hand as we just concentrated on ourselves. However, now we’ll obviously prepare well for the coming match.