Uruguay coach Oscar Tabarez believes the opportunity to mix with the best at the World Cup is bringing the greatest football out of his players.
The South Americans finished top of Group A after a 1-0 win over Mexico on Tuesday to move into the last 16 where they will next face South Korea.
Tabarez said: "In the qualifying round, we had good moments and bad moments. We thought if we managed to qualify for the World Cup, we would then have the better environment to work. You see a World Cup has a different motivation...great teams, great players and the qualifying round in South America is something else."
He added: "We are trying to do what we had exactly in mind before the tournament. Now I don't think we've achieved that yet, but Uruguay is now a difficult opponent for anybody.
"We're happy about this, but we also know that we still have far to go. We are a tightly bonded group and we have lots of dreams."
His opposite number Javier Aguirre was also pleased to have reached the next round - despite being unhappy with the way Mexico eventually got there.
It meant that El Tri have now reached the last 16 of five consecutive World Cups and the coach was hoping they could extract revenge on their second round opponents, Argentina, who beat them at this stage four years ago in Germany.
"We wanted to go through, yes, and we managed that," he said. "Now we are with the 16 best teams in the world and we will now have to fight against the other 15 to see who is the best. I think this could be a nice opportunity to take revenge for what happened four years ago."
Asked why his side lacked energy against the Uruguayans, Aguirre added: "I guess the attitude (was missing). We really did not want to win the match.
"I guess what we were missing was the energy. We conceded the goal and then we tried to recover, but we couldn't and then towards the end we lost our spirit."
Source: PA
