I hope the people enjoy it and I ask them not to make our joy someone else's tragedy. No win is worth someone's life, so I ask the Turkish people to enjoy themselves, celebrate and have fun but not to hurt anyone when they do it. To lose a victory in such a short period of time is a serious mental blow for any team – I thought we would have a chance in the shoot-out because of that. If you look at our run, we have always come back and that's not easy. Let's hope against Germany we can take the lead. There is no limit to our success. After Croatia scored, I saw players lying on the pitch and I told Arda to get the ball out of the goal and start again. I wasn't giving up. We could have lost but there were things we could do about it. I always say there is much more we can do as a country of 70 million people and there is more success we can achieve. We seem to come back from the dead. We always do the hard thing, not the easy thing, which shows how good my team are. When you have footballers like this, you just don't lose.
This was a good match and I would like to congratulate everyone who took part in it. The game had an incredible ending, the kind you can only find in football. If you sum it up after 120 minutes, we had more opportunities than Turkey. They obviously exerted some pressure on us for a while and were tough opponents but we have beaten better teams so far. We expected them to do all they could to equalise in the last minute or two. Of course, they weren't bothered about conceding a second as they had to push up to equalise. We received the ball and launched a counterattack which ended in offside.
They didn't wait for their players to go forward, there were only a couple of them up front, but there was a powerful shot which took a deflection and went in. This is the third match Turkey have won in this extreme manner and if they continue to be lucky and don't give up, they might even reach the final. It is obvious that they have quality and the X factor which you need in football. Turkey have already shown they're able to do anything. Having one less rest day than Germany is a handicap and extra time and penalties are also exhausting. They have a number of injured players and suspensions, but some might come back and they won't give up.
source
