UTAH ROYALS FC 0(2)-0(3) Houston Dash
ZIONS BANK STADIUM; HERRIMAN, UTAH
JULY 17, 2020
Head Coach Craig Harrington
Overall thoughts:
“They [Houston] were the lucky ones today that put their penalties away and won it, so congratulations to them and good luck to them the rest of the tournament. Proud of the team, I thought performance wise we really didn’t have a disaster of a performance through the tournament, I thought that we were pretty steady, a lot of improvements today. The goal was to keep a clean sheet and we did that, and we thought that if we did that we would find a way to score, it didn’t go that way, but overall for everyone to contribute the way that they have on and off the field. We’ve got some real tired legs now, so hopefully some must deserved rest for them and hopefully time to regroup, and we’ll go back as a coaching staff and see what we have to do to get better.”
On what to grow from with these past games:
“I think just being ruthless and taking your chances, we saw that in this morning’s game, Carolina had lots of chances and they let a team like Portland hang around and they scored. There are no easy games in this league and it sounds cliche, but every team, if you don’t put them to bed, will come back and hurt you. We’ve just got to get better when we’ve got the momentum to understand that the momentums with us and really put teams to the sword, and we never really did that in this tournament, for whatever reason. We’ll go back and analyze everything, we’ll look at everybody else’s games and just try and get better from a team, from a coaching point of view and from an individual player point of view.”
On analyzing his first season as head coach:
“I’ll take a step back, obviously I’ll meet with my staff and talk to them, and we’ll really analyze and be really critical of each other, see the ins and outs of ways to get better. The team didn’t get through, that’s on me, the buck stops with me. It hurts a lot right now. We want to be in the semifinal with the chance to play in our stadium. I haven’t even coached in that stadium, this was still an away game, we haven’t played at home, so the chance to get that at some point is what I want to have.”
Forward Amy Rodriguez
Overall Thoughts:
“I hate walking away from tonight’s game. Credit to our team, we played our hearts out. I’m so proud of the girls, in such a crazy year we still fought to the very end and as the leader on this team I take responsibility, missing that first PK, the always weighs heavily on you, but again I could not be more proud of the girls. At the end of the day, I told the girls, win or lose ‘I love you guys,’ we’ll play our hearts out for each other and I think you saw that today.”
On how she assesses the tournament as whole:
“I saw a lot of team growth and you could see it. We used a lot of players and we have a lot of talent on this team and in such a short span of time to try and get everything to click together I thought we did what we could. There is always room for improvement, personally there is room for improvement and I’ll take this loss and remember it and have it in the back of my mind while I’m training and doing those double days in the offseason and we’ll come back at it again.”
On her message to the team:
“I think we’re going to get together once more tonight, this team is unified, this team is together and all players look after each other. I said if I made a mistake, I hope I have 28 players who have my back and visa-versa and it really does feel that way. Again, I’ll go home, still embrace my teammates and support them. Like I said, I’m so proud of them and we’ll pick up, we’ll be okay.”
