Frank Lampard: "I am in favour of goal-line technology, especially after tonight. The ball crossed the line, it was over, it was was so obvious. If we had got back to 2-2 at that moment, it could have been different. It's a huge disappointment."

Joe Cole: "We have to look at ourselves as a group and we weren't good enough from the start of the friendlies, the six games we've played, so it is back to the drawing board. I don't know why this is. If I knew, I'd put it right. We will go away and start again but we have to address the problems that are there.

"It is not for me to talk to you guys about it but we need to just step up. We're all in it together - everyone who has been involved with England from the qualifying campaign. We got to the last 16 of the World Cup. We got to the last eight last time so we need to improve.

"I am bitterly disappointed. There are a lot of issues. We wanted to do well and sometimes we just weren't good enough, plain and simple. It is hard to say we were second best. No-one likes doing it but that's life unfortunately. We came up against a team who were better than us."

Steven Gerrard: "There were big key decisions in the game, at 2-1 we had a goal disallowed. At 2-1 we were hurting them and we were still in the game.When you go 2-0 down and then you get a goal back it gives you a lot of confidence and belief and then to see that ball bounce behind the line and see the linesman 20 metres behind play is very disappointing.

"Fifa will have to look at that because I looked across at the linesman and he was by the edge of the area so how can he see if that's over the line or not. I think it [the disallowed goal] had an effect but we cannot use that as an excuse with being beaten 4-1. That would have been a big goal for us. It's all ifs and buts. Germany are a fantastic team and they deserved their win.

"You go away and you have a think about what went wrong and why we didn't progress further in the tournament. As a team we've made a big mistake today and we've been beaten by a good team. They were more clinical in front of goal and they made less mistakes than us and we got punished for that today."

Joachim Löw: "We knew that the midfielders - Gerrard and Lampard - always support the forwards and that their midfield would be open. We knew there would be spaces. Our objective was to set Terry up with Klose to force him to come out of the defence.

"We knew the full-backs would be very much to the side, and that would create space that we could penetrate. We could have been 3-0 up in the first half because we did penetrate them."

Fabio Capello: "I have time to decide [on his position as England manager], I have to speak with the chairman. We have to wait until we come back to London. I want to see if he still has confidence in me. I have to think about everything."

Thomas Müller: "We heard the ball was behind the line. It was a bit of luck, which we had to seize with both hands."

Fabio Capello: "We scored. It is incredible. In this period of technology, in this period where we can have five referees, we cannot decide if that was a goal or not. We have to speak about this goal. We have to speak about a mistake from the linesman - and the referee because I could see it had gone in from the touchline. I saw the ball bounce and go over the line.

"If we score the second goal, we can play in a different style. We played well at 2-1, but after that the mistakes that we made, disappointed. They played well, but the referee made the more big mistake than the players. I don't know. Today we played a good game, but that little thing decided the result, always.

"We probably arrived a little bit tired at the end of the season. But after the game that they played against Slovenia, we suffered from Germany's speed today. But I say again, I am sure that a big mistake from the referee stopped us from going forward."

Paul Ince: "Overall, you have got to be honest, we just weren't good enough. [Wayne] Rooney didn't actually get going, never got started. There were too many players who didn't play well in this tournament, and that's why we are not in the quarter-finals. We have got to learn from that, we have got to come back stronger."

John Barnes: "Our problem with England is that we rely so much on individuals. We have no method, we don't have a collective effort.

"Because we have players playing for Manchester United, Liverpool, we assume they are the best players in the world because the Premier League is the strongest league. This will be a lesson to us to say maybe we are not as good as we think we are."

Bastian Schweinsteiger: "I am very proud of the team and what we have achieved over the 90 minutes. We played very well tactically, we were compact and our forwards put in some good movement. Of course, we had some luck with Lampard's effort."

Joachim Löw: "I said to my team at the half-time break, we need to try and score the third goal. We knew we could hit England on the counter-attack because they were open. Our players carried it off brilliantly."

Thomas Müller: "Against England you'll give up goal chances at some point. They have so many good players. We had some luck and took the lead. After we went 3-1 up, we improved and the match was soon over after that."

Miroslav Klose: "I was very impressed with the performance today. In this match we were on top of things from the start, we were totally into the match and we deserved to win. We'll see how we do in the next match. Our goal is to get the semi-finals. We'll see what happens from there."

Lee Dixon: "Frankly it was the worst team performance defensively I have ever seen, and if that's the case you will get a hiding. The Germans deserve credit as they were a much better team. It was awful. I have never seen a group of defenders dragged around a field like that. We were ripped to pieces."

Alan Shearer: "It was a good yard [over], all the ex-professionals and the superstars want it, every single person is calling for goal-line technology except for one person. Not everyone can be wrong can they?"