I started the Handball World Championship thinking that it's going to be good, but... — Noémi Háfra

"I can't wish for more for my birthday than this victory. We talked about winning by as many goals as we can to get the best possible result in the final ranking. I had to throw in my last reserves of power in the end. They were very quick on one-on-one, sometimes we managed to hold them back, sometimes we couldn't. But the end is important. Of course, I have a feeling we missed something, not just this one was the goal. And the success today doesn't change that. From the moment we learned we won't advance, we made the most out of it, but the work can't stop. There's more to this team. If the missing players were here, maybe there could have been more to this, but it also matters a lot when this team started working together. We can be happy with the last two games, but the main goal has not been achieved. The road goes uphill from here!" – said Szimonetta Planéta, who became a regular player again in the national team after a long time, to M4 Sport.

"We saw how the Germans defeated the Koreans. We said during the break that the first 10 minutes in the second half will be very important, we definitely have to push it hard to open the scissors as big as possible. We wanted to make the most out of the last two games because we knew goal difference could play a part. I'm glad we managed it at these games. And we had the last two successes after the Danish game," said Blanka Bíró, who finished the World Championship with a 32-percent defensive efficiency.

“We had to work on our confidence a lot, encouraging people to do it, to keep doing it. Let's not have a long face because there were some mistakes. This is what it is, we have to learn from the mistakes to play better in key matches against Denmark and Germany. But you learn the hard way. Let's hope it will be better next year. I go back to the match against Germany where we fought, but they finished one goal better in the end. If that game goes any other way, the whole World Championship scenario is different. But in sports, there's no if... We're going home disappointedly because I think there could have been a lot more than this. But this was the Hungarian national team now,” the FTC goalkeeper added.

"We thought that since this is our last match, we want to show what we've got and that we can fight to the extremes," said Gréta Márton Gréta in front of the camera of M4 Sport. "I'm sorry we had to say goodbye like this, but we really did our best in the last game. I really wanted to play well, I wanted to take on the role of Nadine, I wanted to be a reference point on the side, so the girls would trust me. I'm glad the shots came out well, that I've had good moves in defense, but I have to improve a lot. I'm going to try to perform even better in the future. We'll never know what would've happened without the injuries. We lacked in experience and needed someone who was a leader in defense and in attack. Blanka Bíró has been of a great help to us as the team's captain, and I am confident that in time a lot of us can take on this leading role. We travel home with mixed feelings. I'm happy with the four winning games, but the two defeats are painful. We will learn from them, and we want to beat them too in the future."

"I went to the court thinking it's life or death. There's no question here, no tiredness, no pain, nothing. We came out like it was the quarterfinal, Noémi Háfra, who scored eight goals this time, rated the last match and then the entire World Championship. “We defended what we had to defend. Of course, there were surprises because the Koreans are short but fast, and they don't play European handball. But we responded well and solved what we had to. My performance was fluctuating. I got a little tired, there weren't many of us, and we couldn't rotate the team the way other teams did. Unfortunately, that's how we had to play now. But what we had to do, we did in the end. I started the World Championship thinking that it's going to be good, but we have to see because we're still at the beginning of our work with the new staff. It's going to go well, but we're going to need some time to recover, to be able to play at the level to be in the top eight. The world elite is not far – we have to work hard both mentally and physically to be able to carry the weight. We will hold hands and go forward together — I am confident that we will achieve good results."

"We wanted to show what we really are capable of, also to go leave a better taste in our mouths," Petra Tóvizi, pivot player of the national team told Nemzeti Sport. "We were aware that if we won by at least four goals, we could get a better position in the ranking; that's what kept in mind. We wanted to see this match as an opportunity for improvement to be better in the future. It was nice that I was in the match squad, that Vladimir Golovin was counting on me – I love being here, I love my teammates, it means a lot to me that we fight together. It's important to me that I was able to play in the last match.”

Translated by Vanda Orosz.