France's coach reveals victory secrets

"We had an overall strategy for playing against Brazil, as well as individual plans for dealing with their players," began Coach Demenechi while speaking with fifa worldcup.com The elated French sweat merchant continued:" Against a team like that, you can’t take the game to them throughout the 90 minutes, but if you sit back too much, you allow them to exert their stranglehold.

" So the idea was to find the right balance, which we managed to do by retaining control of the game. I wouldn’t say that we dominated, but we did keep the necessary control. That said, we suffered quite a bit late on.

In football, there’s no such thing as a team having to play against 11 reigning world champions. We went out onto the pitch tonight (that was last Sunday's), on equal terms. I don’t want to single out any of my lads in particular. You all seem surprised by how well Zinedine Zidane played, but that’s just what you get with Zizou!.

"I could mention any of the 14 players who did a job for us tonight, and even those who stayed on the bench made contributions. As against Spain, this victory belongs to the whole squad. It wasn’t so much Zidane followed by the others, but rather Zidane together with the others.

"As I’ve been telling you for quite some time now, our target is to be in Berlin on 9 July. But rather than taking the next game for granted, I’m just saying that we’ve reached another stage this evening, an exciting stage, but nothing more. We are happy, but we won’t be telling ourselves that the semi-final is enough and we’ve done what we set out to do at the World Cup.
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We’re going to fight until the end and see where that takes us. Two years ago, we set out with the aim of putting the smile back on the faces of our supporters. I believe we’ve done a pretty good job of that, but I can assure you that there’s more to come!