Swope Park Rangers head coach Nikola Popovic
Thoughts on the match…
“More than the victory (I was happy with) the exhibition, how the team played during all the game, consistently, making all the solutions that was planned and worked during the week. I think perhaps this was one of the best performances of the year.”
On keeping a clean sheet and not losing focus at the end of the game…
“It’s a football game. Always in a set play or a mistake, you can concede a goal. It’s important not to make so many mistakes, I think the team is developing and evolving, so it’s a good performance. Of course when you create so many chances, we have 13 shots, it’s our average, when you make so many chances you can always score. That’s the good part of this game, that we were able to put inside the net a lot of the chances that we created.”
On different players scoring…
“This is a little bit how we play, if you see the game we don’t have players in each position. Everybody knows the roles of every position and we try to move them around. That’s going to happen a lot of times I hope.”
Sporting KC goalkeeper Adrian Zendejas
On recording back-to-back shutout wins…
“It’s not all me, there’s 11 players out there on the field and I’ve got to say big ups to our back four, Musa, Duke and all these guys that do the running – even our wingers, they come back, they go up, so it’s a team performance from all of us. Great performance and we’ve got to look forward to this week, three big games coming up away.”
On watching the team’s attack click from the back…
“We practice this, what, all year since we’ve wanted to play this and I feel like every game we’ve been playing it better. We want to play, this is our model, with Sporting, with Swope, obviously it’s been working out and it’s fun just to see our boys having so much confidence on the ball. It really is a pleasure watching these guys play.”
Swope Park Rangers midfielder Lebo Moloto
On recording a goal and two assists…
“It was a good game, we knew that spaces were going to open throughout the game and after last week, missing a lot of chances, it feels good to get a goal, two assists, felt pretty good.”
On missing a chance moments before opening the scoring…
“I tried to chip the ‘keeper and I don’t know what happened. In my mind I was like ‘ah, here we go again,’ but moments after that I was able to get a goal. Thanks to Kevin’s (Oliveira) through ball, it was a good ball, and got a goal.”
On if the team was more clinical than usual tonight…
“I think that throughout the whole games that we’ve played, we’ve had a lot of chances. We’ve kept the ball, it’s just a matter of taking those chances. Last week against LA we had a couple of chances we could’ve scored but we ended up with a 1-0 win and we came back, and the coach is on our case about trying to finish our chances. Today we took those chances, got some goals.”
On the team getting back-to-back shutout wins…
“If you want to win a championship, win the league, you’ve got to keep those clean sheets. It’s a team effort, we’ve been working throughout the weeks on defending and credit to Adrian (Zendejas), he’s been doing well for us at the back and it’s been pretty good for us to get those clean sheets.”
Rio Grande Valley FC head coach Junior Gonzalez
Thoughts on the match…
“I give a lot of credit to Swope, they came out, they pressed, they fought. I thought they were the aggressors in the game, they had better possession. It was unfortunate to give up the second goal right before half, I think that was the dagger for us. If we could’ve gone in 1-0, recollected, we’d probably get a better effort to tie the game or to get a win out of it. But I was really impressed with Swope. I felt that we were the aggressors and had the majority, or it was at least even in possession when we played at our place, but tonight for sure it was a poor performance from our group mentality wise.”
On playing three road games in a row and coming home for the next game…
“It’s good, we’ve had an interesting schedule so far. I think having a couple days off, we don’t play this weekend, and then we have a home-and-away against OC (Blues) and today we didn’t have some of the guys from the first team, so it was a pure RGVFC team tonight, and it was really good for me as a coach to evaluate our talent that we have in house. It was a good opportunity for some of those guys to perform that haven’t had starts and see where they are against a quality opponent. It’s good either way, we didn’t get the result, it was a bad result on the scoreline but we learned a lot from the team.”
