Sporting KC head coach Peter Vermes
On Sporting KC’s tired legs after four matches in 11 days…
I’m not going to use the excuse of playing Saturday-Wednesday-Saturday-Wednesday. I’m just not going to use it. We did the same thing in the first half in our last game that we did in this game and that’s giving away too many balls out of the back. It’s the reason we gave up the goals we did. We were nonchalant. We didn’t play together as a group. We weren’t good in our individual defending and we were very poor with the ball and with our entry balls out of the back. That allowed them to pick us off and at the end they did a great job of countering us. The difference between last game and this game is they finished three goals off in the first half. It was almost insurmountable for us to come back. You can’t replicate that from week-to-week and I told that to the guys. It was just about us trying to minimize the bleeding with regards to us keeping the ball and being better with it. But we deserved to get beat like that because we didn’t play well.
On tonight’s result defining parity in MLS…
That’s why we never take any team easy. That’s never our stance. As I say all the time, we have respect for every team in this league and we know what can happen. It’s not for coming into the game and thinking we aren’t going to play because that’s not our discussion. But what you can’t do in this league is give the balls away in situations that we did because your team is open and now the other team reacts and counters you. When they do, you are wide open and if they do a good enough job, and these guys did a great job with it tonight, that’s how you score.
On giving up an early goal…
There’s a big difference between when you are down one goal or up one goal. There is an emotional aspect to it. The unfortunate thing is that it’s based on very poor play by us.
On positives from tonight’s match…
When you get your butt kicked like this, you need to now reach down deep and get going. All this talk about us being good goes out the window, which is absolutely right. Nobody in this league has emerged as the team to beat. We are a long way from the end of this season. We have 11 games to play and no one has emerged as doing anything other than we have a lot of games left to play.
Sporting KC goalkeeper Tim Melia
On Sporting KC’s loss to San Jose…
It’s just a very disappointing performance from us tonight, but this game’s over. At the end of the day, it’s our first home loss. We put this game behind us and use it as motivation to wake us up. We have a game in a few days against Columbus, another good team, on the road. This game doesn’t mean anything if we win the next game. So that’s the mentality we have to have.
On Sporting KC falling behind early for the second straight game…
We got scored on in the 3rd minute. You never count this team out—we’ve proved that in the past. We’ve had good resolve and we’ve come back from deficits, but you just can’t have a performance like that. It’s one time in the season and we have to put it behind us and move onto the next game. I don’t know what the answer is to this, but it just has to improve.
On if last week’s wins resulted in fatigue and emotional let-down on Wednesday…
No, it can’t. This is a good group of pros and one Open Cup game shouldn’t affect how we play in an MLS game or in games that are close together in the same week. During the summer, these are the months where you’ve got to grind it out. We have a lot of games and we’ve got to catch up with our games in hand and make them count. We didn’t tonight.
San Jose Earthquakes head coach Dom Kinnear
On how San Jose's formation and strategy was effective...
We weren’t able to give (Anibal) Godoy and Fatai (Alashe) a game together last time because Fatai was suspended. So it made good sense to come here, against a really good team, have some good balance in the midfield and it helped. I thought every one of our players had a good game tonight. Sometimes during the season, that doesn’t happen all of the time. We scored a lot of real good goals, we defended well, we broke well. To have those two in the middle today, it really made us look solid and our possession was really good too.
On Sporting KC giving up two goals in first 10 minutes...
They do come out with a lot of energy. If you don’t break their pressure, you’re asking for trouble. At times, if you can break their pressure and get good numbers around the ball, it could lead to chances. Our ability to beat guys on the dribble tonight opened up some space, especially Shea Salinas on the first goal, his play was excellent. Not just that but our ball movement was good. Because they do press high, and it’s so hard to break, if your first pass out of pressure is good and you maintain possession, then there will be a chance that you can run into some space and it worked out well for us tonight.
On the result for Sporting KC after a dramatic comeback this past weekend...
I watched their game with Vancouver. Going into halftime 3-0 up, I knew the game was far from over. We had a couple of good chances there to extend our lead, which would really make the game in good shape for us. Luckily for us, we really held them off from a little bit of pressure. Then we got that fourth goal and that really kind of quieted everything down for us. So at 3-0 coming in at halftime, obviously knowing what we saw in the previous week and knowing the players they have and the amount of energy this crowd gives them, a lot of things are possible.
On if his team had more energy than Sporting KC...
Not necessarily, no. I don’t really look at the game and go, “We have more energy than them." I don’t really look at the game in that way, I’m just trying to follow the game as closely as I can. I thought we were very unselfish with our play going forward. That was really helpful. But that first pass out of pressure for us was the key and Quincy (Amarikwa) and Chris (Wondolowski) did a really good job of that for us, allowing guys to support them. That’s where we cause a lot of problems.
San Jose forward Chris Wondolowski
On San Jose’s win over Sporting KC…
It’s a very difficult place to win and Kansas City is a very good team. I think we caught them at a good time tonight—they’ve had a lot of game in a short amount of time. We had our backs against the walls and we were going to come out swinging to keep our playoff aspirations afloat. That’s our goal right now. We had a game plan and we executed it.
On San Jose’s strong start to the match…
Soccer is a huge game of momentum. We came out and got a goal very early. I thought we played some inspired soccer, especially early, and when you get a goal or two the other team starts pressing. That leads to a couple more gaps, and we were able to punish them executing our chances.
On San Jose’s offensive performance…
You keep the ball moving and you play the one-two touch. It’s very hard to defend. We had Quincy (Amarikwa) up there who was an absolute beast and helped us hold up the ball. You can get guys running off of him going forward, and that helped a lot. He was an intricate part of all the goals, and that’s something very important for us to have linking up the play.
On climbing to sixth place on the all-time MLS scoring chart with two goals…
It’s really cool—I didn’t know that. The big thing was getting the win. I’m hoping we can reach the playoffs and I’ll be able to reflect on that in the offseason, but it’s a really cool thing.
