Simon Gerrans has dismissed suggestions the Australian team should have raced only for Michael Matthews in the world road-race championship in which he placed second.

Gerrans said the tactics to support he and Matthews in the 261.4-kilometre race at Richmond, Virginia, were outlined clearly before the start to all in the nine-rider Australian team. Gerrans also doubts that any different tactic would have stopped Slovakian Peter Sagan from winning as he did with his solo attack.

Sagan, 25, attacked with 2.8km to go on the second last climb of the 16.2km circuit. Matthews, 25, took the silver medal by winning the bunch sprint from Lithuania's Ramunas Navardauskas, who was third.

Gerrans, 35 and the silver medallist last year at Ponferrada, Spain, finished in the same group as Matthews at three seconds to Sagan and placed sixth. Matthews later lamented on what might have been had Gerrans ridden for him in the finale, rather than the pair both chancing their fate by sprinting for themselves.

Matthews went to Richmond having declared his hope the entire Australian team would support him; but Gerrans said both riders deserved to be protected based on form, planning and suitability to the course. Gerrans said the call to support both riders was agreed upon by the team and sports director Brad McGee before the race.

"Leading into the race [Matthews] was pretty vocal saying that he would like support from the team," Gerrans told Fairfax Media from the US. "But under the circumstances and how we both prepared for the race we decided to go with the option of giving us both the opportunity. I think we both deserved that. We were both right there at the end of the day and regardless of whether we took a different tactic, Peter Sagan I think was clearly the best guy in the race. He really deserved to win. I'm not sure there is much we could have done about that.

"The way that Peter rode, it wouldn't have mattered how many leaders you had in the team, we couldn't have done much about that."

Gerrans' comments came in light of Matthews' post-race remarks in Cyclingnews. Asked how many teammates he had to support him in the last kilometres, Matthews: "I think that I had maybe three guys."

Pressed on whether Gerrans helped him, Matthews said: "No, I think we were sprinting against each other unfortunately. We had two leaders so it is [what] it is."

Matthews regretted the tactic, saying: "Yeah, I would have liked the full support but it is what it is. We came in with two leaders."

Gerrans said he spoke to Matthews about his remarks and the Australian team had met to discuss the outcome and how the team rode in a team meeting afterwards. "We had a debrief, the whole team together," Gerrans said. "Everyone spoke about their day and what they did – what they did well and didn't do well.

"The general consensus was that we couldn't have done much more; everyone rode to the occasion, everyone fulfilled the roles that were asked of them today and some. Everyone was really pleased with the result at the end of the day. The entire team did really well. It was never the case of somebody didn't do what was asked of them, or somebody didn't do what was expected of them throughout the day. Everyone was aware of their roles and expectations for the race."