New England Revolution head coach Jay Heaps
What caused the poor start?
It’s a poor start. We gave away three goals before 30 minutes, it just was not good enough on all fronts.
We have to gut it. There’s going to be moments when we have to respond and be ready. Tonight, we were ready to go, had a great gameplan and were well-prepared but the start was just flat.
What type of adjustments did you try to make after going down?
We made a couple of changes—we had an injury to Kevin [Alston] that was a reaction sub, and the other ones were proactive. Trying to get Jerry [Bengtson] on the field, then get Saer [Sene] some minutes.
Is there a sense that the close calls you had in the second half will start to go your way?
We’ve got to keep fighting every day. Some days you get your nose rubbed in it, and we certainly got our nose rubbed in it today and it didn’t smell too good.
Do you have to reset ahead of next week vs. Philadelphia?
I think they reset it for us. These are games where we get tested and find out what guys are made of. We’ve got to find out what we’re made of. We have to do a better job as a staff, we’ve got to do a better job as players preparing. We have to get ourselves ready for another big game.
New England Revolution defender A.J. Soares
Thoughts on the poor start to the match
I think it was just a tale of two different teams. One team that started great and one team that started poorly. They punished us and we couldn’t recover from there. They controlled the game the whole night. We had flashes of good stuff that we can build on going forward—some good play going forward, some good defending, but overall just not a good enough team effort. We weren’t on the same page and it’s something we can look on the film and improve, so that’s the positive we take from it.
That makes it tough, but we’ve been there before and we need to respond better. We can’t drop our heads and let them keep coming at us. We need to respond, we need to go get a goal. We just weren’t good enough today, they were better than us for the entire 90 minutes.
How different might it have been had your header gone in at the end of the first half?
I wanted it to go in. It bounces back, I was trying to make some tackles, trying to get some energy going. Overall just not good enough really. I think had the header gone in, we get a little more life to us. That being said, they beat us tonight no matter what.
I don’t think we reset. I think we had moment out of preseason, we’ve built a lot. We know who are as a team, we know our style of play and we’re going to stick to that. We’re not going to change, it’s not like we need any big overhauls or anything. Just get back to the way we play and commit to the game, everybody play both sides of the ball as hard as we can. We do that, we’ll be fine.
Did you have confidence coming into the match based on your success in Houston last year?
We were confident coming into the game, we thought we were going to come out, do well, win the game. I’m sure they were confident, too, that they were going to win. It’s two good teams playing, on a lot of days it’s going to be a close game but today it wasn’t. It hurts, it stings, it’s going to fuel us going forward. It’s the beginning of the season, you want to start with three points but like I said, the positive is we got our butts kicked and that means we’ve got to improve.
