Coming off a 2-2 draw against the New York Red Bulls over the weekend that saw his team concede late, Chicago Fire head coach Veljko Paunovic spoke with local media members on a conference call this afternoon about how his team is moving on from a match that he had hoped to win.
“We all know how it is,” he said. “When you win, you have that night to celebrate you’re great and to enjoy when you win the game, but then the next you have to forget about everything and start moving forward and prepare the next game. The same happens when you lose the game or when you tie the game like we did the last game, which for us felt like a loss.”
#CHIvNY Postmatch Reaction | Veljko Paunovic
Paunovic’s side shared the points with the visiting Red Bulls after forward Bradley Wright-Phillips leveled things in the 90th minute with his 12th goal of the season. Despite the letdown, his team must now pivot into a crucial weekend ahead with two road games in a span of three days, beginning with Saturday night’s contest at Real Salt Lake (9 p.m. CT, CSN Chicago).
“We expect [to face] a team that wants to win,” Paunovic said. “For the sake of positioning, how well they’re performing in the season so far, for them they see this game as a must-win so it’s going to make this game tougher for us. Playing on the road for us is going to also be a challenge. But we believe that just by playing like we are doing right now, keeping our identity - that mentality of playing 90 minutes even when you concede goals - is something we have to improve. We make our games tough for our opponents. That’s why we have to go to Salt Lake and play with the same identity.”
By the time the whistle blows after Saturday night’s match in Utah, it will just about be Sunday. Paunovic will then face the task of switching gears into next Tuesday’s 2016 Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup semifinal match in New England against the Revolution. The Fire have faced New England twice in Foxborough already this season, both losses. The Open Cup, however, offers an entirely new challenge.
“It’s going to be different,” Paunovic said. “It’s a different motivation for everyone – for us, for New England, for everyone who’s participating in the Open Cup game. There’s motivation from that standpoint. It’s a different, different thing from playing in the regular competition. I would say for how we’re preparing, I would prefer to talk about that once it’s done, because I don’t want to discover our strategy for those games. I can just say that both of them we’re taking very seriously.”
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In taking both matches seriously, Paunovic will have to continue to both monitor the fitness and fatigue of his first team regulars as well as keep his younger players sharp should he need to lean on them in one of the team’s upcoming matches.
“We’re having this scrimmage game where we have to build the proper pace of the game for the guys who are not playing,” he said. “We have to be ready for any adjustment we may have to do. Right now we know that in the game against (RSL) that (defender) Joao (Meira) is not going to play, so we have to see now where the available guys stand – the guys who weren’t participating in the games so often. That’s on one side. On the other side would be to recover the guys that had minutes and had a month of games and minutes and loads, so we have to recover them, then prepare for the game in New England.”
With his first half-season at the helm now behind him, Paunovic is leaning on the incremental steps his team has taken over the last few weeks and months to carry them into what he hopes will be a successful week.
“We believe that we are having huge improvements in our team in the last month, especially when we are playing at home,” he said. “I think that’s the process. As I’ve said many times, we started with building our solid defense, now we are very competitive paying our games at home, we are good in the competition like Open Cup. We said many times how important it is for the history of the club and for our culture, and having that opportunity to be the first club to win five times this competition is a huge motivation for us. All these things, I think they sum together and they come in play now when the things are becoming very interesting and very competitive.”
The upcoming weekend is no doubt a crucial one for Paunovic’s Men In Red, and -- while the challenge is clear -- he remains encouraged by his team’s developments to this point.
“In front of us, there are challenges that we have to deal with, but there are also behind us a lot of things that we’ve improved,” he said. “For me, it’s very, very important to see that there is a process, that there is improvement and most important of all is we are becoming very competitive.”
