Marco van Basten believes his Netherlands team "can have nice dreams" if they continue to play with the quality which enabled them to brush aside Italy in Berne. The legendary striker was proud to watch his team make history – and finally get one over on the world champions after losing four times to the Azzurri as a player. His opposite number and former AC Milan team-mate Roberto Donadoni was philosophical in defeat, saying: "It was definitely a bad night but we'll take stock of what happened and look to the future."
Marco van Basten, Netherlands coach
You could say that I'm proud. I'm proud that we won against the world champions, and at the way we played football tonight, scoring three goals and playing until the last minute. It was a historic result because in the past we have never beaten Italy 3-0 – this was a serious performance. The players responded in a wonderful way and played like a team, showing amazing spirit. If we play with this quality we can have nice dreams. Until the very last minute we tried to play proper football, and made life difficult for the Italians. In spite of their pressure we continued playing and I have to congratulate my team for pushing on and scoring.
We cannot talk of a new era, we have won one game – the first in our pool. I'm very happy to beat a big opponent but we have only taken one step. If you have the spirit we had tonight you're able to do nice things, but there are a lot of other good teams here. In several areas we were better than the Italians but they have many good and experienced players in their team. I'm convinced they'll recover as they have too much class not to. This is only one game, and we will prepare in the same way for the others. If we lose to France, we have problems again. This is only the first step, and we'll have to see if we can repeat it against France and Romania.
Roberto Donadoni, Italy coach
When we went 1-0 down things got complicated and for the second we were not quick enough to recover our positions after the corner. We looked strong physically and created a few chances but it wasn't our night. I think the Netherlands played as well as we expected them to. We knew they were capable of creating chances and making life difficult for us and that's what they did but we made mistakes and paid for it. It started badly and ended up worse but this is already history and we need to think about the next game against Romania. We need to recover physically and mentally so we can put things right straight away.
If we're not optimistic we should go off on holiday instead of taking the flight to Zurich. The players need to put this defeat behind them, understand the mistakes we've made. As of tomorrow we'll start working on them so they don't happen again. We were naïve at conceding goals on the counterattack. We took a corner and were not attentive enough afterwards. We didn't defend properly. Obviously in the light of this result, we're happy that France and Romania drew. It's to our advantage but also shows that Romania are a team who'll make it difficult for us.
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