SAN JOSE EARTHQUAKES HEAD COACH MIKAEL STAHRE
On the team’s performance in the first half:
“We played against a very good team this evening. In the first half, the opponent put us under pressure. They pressed us really high and also overloaded the center space, so of course they put us in trouble. The second half was much better. We created lots of chances. From my perspective, we deserved at least one goal in the second half, maybe two.”
On New York City FC goalkeeper Sean Johnson:
“He performed well, absolutely, but we have to take care of our chances. He’s a great goalkeeper. My assistant coach Alex de Crook showed me some stats that it was around seven chances in the second half. We must score.”
On the second half:
“I must see the game and the goals, but we played against a good team. We put ourselves in trouble a couple of times with easy mistakes on goal. Of course we can always discuss situations and evaluate that afterwards, but generally speaking we handled the second half in a good way. We deserved at least a tie this evening.”
On if the team was too defensive after scoring the early goal:
“That’s also quite normal in a game that when you score an early goal and they put pressure, so it was absolutely not the purpose in the game plan. We tried to press them high, that was really clear, but they played well also. They put us in trouble. We tried to press them high, but we couldn’t in the first half. We made small changes in the shape and talked about it at halftime, and we were much better in the second half.”
On his message to the team going forward:
“Now there are a lot of emotions, also for the coach. We have to analyze it and talk about the game. Then we have to prepare for the next game. That’s the only thing we can do. It’s really nice to now play every single week after two bye weeks already. We played against maybe one of the best teams in the MLS at the moment. I think especially in the second half we played really well, so I’m happy about that and that will be the message to the players Monday morning.”
SAN JOSE EARTHQUAKES FORWARD CHRIS WONDOLOWSKI
On the team’s effectiveness in the second half:
“To be honest I thought that was our better half. Obviously, it didn’t show in the score but I thought we came out and played better, but obviously not effective enough.”
On keeping up the pressure after scoring an early goal:
“I think it’s definitely the balance and what we need to figure out and do better. It’s good to get that lead, but once we get that goal we need to make sure we need to find the right way to correct the path and fix that because we seem to let up goals in bunches.”
SAN JOSE EARTHQUAKES DEFENDER FLORIAN JUNGWIRTH
On the difficulty to defend New York City after scoring early:
“I think currently they’re the best team in the league. You see that they have very good players and a very good game plan. They attack really well which makes it hard to play all the time, for example like we played against Minnesota. We knew before that it was going to be a good fight, but we took the early lead which was really good and we fought them in a good way.”
On fighting to get back in the game:
“They had one or two good chances, but I think all in all the lead was earned. They had a nice goal, which was unlucky, and the second goal hurt us for sure. We came back and showed a lot of self-confidence when we played long balls to Quincy and Danny up front, and we had some chances for the equalizer. Unfortunately, we didn’t score. We came out with zero points which is really sad for us.”
