Chicago Fire FC head coach Ezra Hendrickson spoke to the media following his squad's 3-0 loss to Minnesota United FC.
On whether there is a lack of communication amongst the attacking players…
“I don't think there's a lack of communication. I thought maybe we just made some bad decisions tonight, especially in the first half. You know, we have opportunities, like you said, to play a guy who may be in a better position and we chose to do otherwise with the ball. So these are things that we have to look at this game again and talk about it and discuss it with the team because we need to improve going forward.
I thought, especially in the first half, when we defended and we won the ball, we just gave it away too easily, sometimes not even under pressure. So we weren't very clinical. We weren't very technical on the night. But these are things we can improve and we just have to keep working.”
On the second yellow card shown to Federico Navarro…
“Well, I haven't got a chance to look at it yet but I thought maybe he was a little quick. The fact that he was carrying another yellow, but I have to look at it again before I could even comment on that.
At the end of the day, we shouldn't put ourselves in that position to have to make that tackle. So we can't really blame the refs for anything tonight. I thought once we went down a man, though, it changed the game, because you're on the road trying to play a man down just like we did in Orlando, and it's very difficult. Our two losses have come when we've had to play short, and that's difficult to do, especially on the road.”
On whether the substitutions for Kacper Przybyłko and Xherdan Shaqiri were due to fatigue…
“Well, Shaq, we have to be careful. He's just coming back from injury. He's been out two, three weeks now. We knew coming into the game, he couldn't play 90. We were expecting maybe 60, 65 but once they scored, we tried to keep him on the field, because he's a guy who is possibly going to get us a goal. But after a while, it's the risk versus reward: Do we keep him out there and risk him re-injuring that calf or do we just try to go to someone else?
And as far as Kacper, we wanted to give (Jhon) Durán a run and see if maybe he can get us something, maybe we could defend and get behind with his pace, but it just didn't happen on the night for us.”
