NWSL POST-GAME QUOTES
Portland Thorns FC vs. Sky Blue FC
May 24, 2014 – Providence Park (Portland, Ore.)
Final: Thorns FC 0, Sky Blue FC 1
Portland Thorns FC Quotes
Portland Thorns FC head coach Paul Riley
On Portland’s offensive performance:
“Fourth game straight I think we’ve had over 20 shots. We have to start putting some of the chances away. Tremendous amount of chances and I wouldn’t even say difficult chances. Easy chances and we just haven’t put them away. It puts pressure on the backline. One mistake, Emily [Menges] lost her mark and I think Nadine [Angerer] probably should have come out to be perfectly honest with you. I said to them at halftime about the amount of wasted balls, wasted chances, even in the first half. Eventually Emily or Nikki [Marshall] is going to make a mistake. Unfortunately, it was Emily tonight who made it. She got pulled off. Second half was much better than the first half. First half was a bit disappointing with the quality of play. Second half, I thought we were really good, created a ton of chances. Again Sinc [Christine Sinclair] couldn’t get one, Jess [McDonald] missed a couple of golden chances, Mana [Shim] missed a beautiful chance from the free kick, Allie [Long] missed two or three chances and again ten corner kicks. I think we’re probably leading the league in corner kicks, for and probably against. You always take positives from anything. I’m not feeling too positive right now to be honest with you.”
On the first-half performance:
“I wasn’t happy with the first half at all. We talked about the first 20 minutes again like Wednesday night where we really came out and gave it to them in the first 20. I wrote one thing on the way out and it was ‘no complacency.’ I thought we were complacent tonight first 20 minutes. I think [the players] thought we’d just show up and Sky Blue would roll over and die. We’re just about the same as everybody else when the firepower isn’t on the field. It doesn’t matter how many chances you create if you don’t bang them in. They caused trouble, even in the first half. Ocampo had a couple of great chances. We just didn’t look to the races at all in first half. We just didn’t have enough bite to us tonight, in that first half especially. You can’t play at home and not have bite, not when you have a crowd like that supporting you. I don’t understand it. It was rubbish the first half. I don’t know what the shots were at halftime, but we probably doubled it second half I would think.”
On Sky Blue FC’s game plan:
“I thought they played exactly how we thought they were going to play. We knew [Sophie] Schmidt would cause us trouble coming from deep. We talked about [Monica] Ocampo. You can’t give her space. She’s intelligent, she’s got a great shot on her. Kelley O’Hara is going to try and get behind. She’s got speed. [Maya] Hayes comes in. She’s got speed. They’re not particularly mobile in the defensive midfield position or towards their left-hand side in the back. That’s really where our concentration was, but unfortunately in those two areas were Allie and Jess. They’d been our two major success stories and they just weren’t at the races tonight and it hurt us.”
Thorns FC forward Christine Sinclair
On missing scoring chances:
“On a night like this the team needed a goal or two. Myself, but also other players, just couldn’t find the back of the net. The past three games, especially home games, we’ve had a ton of chances but haven’t been able to put teams away. Tonight, literally it seemed like they got one chance and they buried it.”
On her runs going unrewarded:
“The past two games Paul’s had me up top as a target. He told me to run in behind defense. It’s one of my strengths, the timing of runs. Sometimes they go unseen, players have different ideas. It does get a little frustrating, but maybe there’s something I need to do differently, maybe demand it more from my teammates. We’re growing.”
On her header that was cleared off the line:
“It reminded me actually a lot of the one against Seattle, just found myself open; got a head on it, hit someone standing on the goal line. Those are the things you talk about that when things are rolling for you those go in and right now they’re not for me, they’re hitting people standing on the post.”
On if there might have been a letdown after Wednesday’s win:
“We know that every game is important in this league, every team is fighting for points, there are a lot of teams at the top of the table. Obviously, Seattle is a bit ahead of everyone but then there’s a logjam of teams. We can’t take any team for granted, that’s something Paul talked about before the game. I don’t think we did, it took us awhile to get going. We didn’t start as well as we did against Western New York, I think it showed.”
On Sky Blue’s performance tonight:
“You have to give them credit. They’re a very well-organized team, with someone like Christie Rampone at center back, they’re going to be hard to breakdown, and they were, they really capitalized on their chances. They punished us tonight on a long free kick. Those are just things we can’t let happen. We can’t allow anyone to get on the end of a free kick like that.”
On if she is frustrated:
“I’m frustrated that we lost. I know our team can play better. I think it’s unacceptable that, at times, we got outworked tonight which is unacceptable at home.”
