FC Dallas Head Coach Luchi Gonzalez
On how team responded throughout the game….
We have a great group of human beings. We have a very together locker room and I think our foundation, even with the new players and the new additions, in the short amount of time they’ve shown those characteristics and values for the team. They pushed we’ve pushed every beginning of the game, every game we’ve pushed and time we concede I see us respond. So we have that in our DNA and in our mentality. We train that way. We challenge them to make comebacks in training so that was the exercise today. We turned it around and got the lead in the 82nd minute. Statistically, I know the game was one that we showed proactiveness and going for it getting numbers forward, getting numbers in the box and getting shots.
We were very disappointed with ourselves not to get very many shots in Minnesota. We wanted to show a completely different stat or set of stats this game. I say we did a lot of that but we still conceded two goals. I thought they were both similar. They felt like just like gifts ones they didn’t necessarily earn with collective play with the ball, you know, just little transition moments that a ball ends up in our box. But that’s the game we play. That’s the sport we play.
It’s just heartbreaking and it’s painful because this is a game we were wining with ten minutes left and we don’t find within each other the savvy, the game management, the street smarts to hold the result and to win the game
About Franco’s performance...
I am really happy he got his goal tonight. You know how nines work with nines, they just need that first goal and things start to open up. I am very confident that he is going to start to find the back of the net more often and continue to show that energy, movement and hunger that he showed tonight.
FC Dallas Defender Ryan Hollingshead
Thoughts on the team’s progression this season…
I’ve been really proud of the guys. We have just been creating more. Today, especially, we were just not afraid to take shots, not afraid to try to create in the final third, not afraid to send crosses in the box and just try to get anything on target that we could get on target. Especially after the games that we’ve had where we’ve kind of gotten there, knocking on the door, but just haven’t taken that final shot or made that final pass. I thought tonight we put a lot of those things together.
At some point though, you just have to have a little bit more conviction in the final third. We had plenty of chances to put them away and weren’t able to do so. Some of that is just not getting the right bounce and some balls skidding under the goalie’s arm and somehow popping over the net and little things like that. Things aren’t bouncing our way but also we have to create our own luck and make sure that when we are in that final third we’re doing everything we can to put it in the back of the net. There’s a lot of things that are positive in the way that we are playing right now but also it needs to correlate into points. As long as it’s not doing that then nobody can be happy about it.
FC Dallas Forward Franco Jara
On his performance…
I felt happy to score my first goal today. It felt great to get that confidence and I want to keep going on a streak. I want to help the team pick ourselves up and give them confidence to keep on fighting. We will take it a game at a time.
