Oh, here we go.
Some great insight from D.C. United president and CEO Kevin Payne after the team finished practice Tuesday morning.
On the patience and understanding of the front office with the team’s start:
We don’t have the luxury of just reacting emotionally. Our job is to try to fix it, try to get it better, and then better, and then eventually get it fixed so I’m not sure that I would say that we’re any more patient. We’re not real patient with the start that we’re having, but we do understand that there are some reasons for it.
The thing is, from my point of view, three of the games in particular, three of the five games are virtually identical. We’re much the better team for long stretches of the game. Certainly the New England and New York games we were the far better team for long stretches. The other team didn’t threaten, and then we have breakdowns in the second half. We get casual on plays, we give up goals, and we get punished badly. We are stuggling right now to recognize the important moments in the game, either the moments when we have to react with urgency in the attacking end to get a goal – and there were balls sitting in the box on rebounds against New York, and nobody attacked them – or we are a little bit asleep on plays that look like they’re not dangerous and then bang, before you know it, it’s in the goal.
I think regardless of who is on the field, the challenge for [head coach] Curt [Onalfo] and the coaching staff is to develop a mentality in our players that they have to play hard for 90 minutes. There’s plenty of other teams in this league that are struggling with injuries. Look at New England and the players that they’re missing. We have to adopt that kind of mentality. We have to go out and fight on every single play.
Shouldn’t that be expected from a professional soccer player?
It’s 90 minutes, They might fight on 9 out of 10 plays. It’s not that they willfully don’t fight. They lose a little bit of concentration for a moment, and bang, they’re punished.
But shouldn’t that be an inate ability at this level?
You’d like to think so but it’s not. And so we discussed yesterday some things to try to get the team focused on results, no matter how ugly they are. Since I’ve checked the standings recently, we haven’t gotten any points for style, and we’re not worried about that right now. If we get the ship righted, and if we add a few players in the summer, maybe we’ll try to go back to playing the kind of soccer that we want to play. But right now, we just have to fight and scratch and claw and run, do all those little things to keep the other team from scoring goals.
Santino Quaranta mentioned that after the New York loss, that playing composed and careful might suit better at this point.
I don’t think we’ve earned the right to play good soccer. It’s a little more fun to play that kind of soccer, and I don’t think that we’ve earned the right this year, and more the point, it’s not working so you have to do what works. If it’s not working, then you’ve got to try something else.
On the confidence of the roster as it is currently put together:
We thought we had a very good core group coming into the season. We always thought that maybe we were going to try to add a significant player in the summer. I know the fans want us to do it when our season starts, but that’s a hard time to add significant players because it’s in the middle of the season for the rest of the world.
We hoped to figure out what we had then try to address what we needed in the summer, and we thought were going to be a better team at the end of the year than we were at the beginning. Certainly, nobody expected us to start like this, and that certainly has added some urgency to add players. But there’s not a lot we can do right now.
Payne said that United technical director Chad Ashton just got back from two weeks in Argentina, and in due course he’s headed to Europe and Africa.
We’re not leaving any stones unturned to try to improve ourselves. In the meantime, I believe we have enough talent in this locker room right now to be one of the better teams in this league.
Where United was once the pioneer when it came to importing significant players from overseas, has that gotten more competitive with other MLS teams?
Ceratinly there’s more teams that actively look there. The league office is more aware. I don’t know if that makes our job any harder. Maybe it makes it marginally more expensive for players because they look at it as a viable market.
On the team’s current state:
I don’t think our problem is talent. We could use some more talent in a few spots. But that’s not why we’re 0-5. We’re 0-5 because we haven’t been as competitive as we needed to be collectively or individually. It seems like every game there are four or five guys that don’t really show up the way you expect them to.
Is the expectation then skewed with some players?
Maybe. I do think there’s a point with certain players, a point at which maybe you have to say, this is it. Maybe this is what we’re going to get, and maybe it’s not as good as we think it is.
Do you believe that is currently true with your team?
You have to. You have to wonder about that with some people.
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