Thorns Post Game: The Interviews - June 7, 2014

Thorns Head Coach Paul Riley

If I’d been in Las Vegas after seeing them train, I would have put money on us tonight. We had a brilliant week of training. We had a full-field scrimmage on Wednesday where the teams were really good. I was delighted coming in. I thought everything was where it should be. That’s the disappointment factor. I was way off base because it didn’t work. You can talk about luck and 20 shots against 22 and you can talk about all that until the end of the day. We weren’t good enough and I have to figure out a way to get us there. Maybe we need to work harder defensively. We do a lot of attacking stuff in practice. Maybe we need to switch and start working on defense. Early in the season when Emily [Menges] was at college, we were doing better. Now that we’re all in here, we have them working together, they had a great week again, but come game-time they looked a little bit dysfunctional. We worked on the back four yesterday. They have probably the best goalkeeper in the world behind them. Just have to tweak something. You have to stop the bleeding first. Have to start in the back. That was the one thing I was happy with early in the season. We weren’t scoring a lot of goals, but at least we weren’t conceding. Now we’ve just opened the gates the last two games and we’ve struggled."

Forward Alex Morgan

"I’ve been looking forward to this game, especially the fact that it’s Veró [Boquete]’s first game, it’s Steph [Catley]’s first game. I feel like we put a really great 11 out there on the field and a couple of unfortunate turn of events and we’re down 2-0, 3-0, and we can’t really get our feet under us. It was hard for me because I’ve been looking forward to this day for a long time, but as a team there needs to be some changes definitely. I just need to get myself together and be positive looking forward because now I’m with the national team for the next two weeks, and hopefully I can continue to improve and recover. Even though my injury has recovered, physically and mentally, I’m still recovering....I was done at the 70th minute, I couldn't go any longer. Unfortunately we only had 10 men and we were out of subs, so that’s the way it went today, but I couldn't run after the 70th minute. I haven’t trained for that period of time. I’m not game-fit. I think that I could tell that and people could tell that by the 70th, 75th minute."

Midfielder Vero Boquete

"We can find lots of problems today. We can be here for an hour talking about all the problems—defense, offense, with the ball, without the ball—everyone has to take their responsibilities—forwards, midfielders, defenders, people on the bench, coaches—everyone has a responsibility with this big loss....Also, we tried to be positive. Championship teams build after a big loss. Let’s hope that this is our big loss and after this we go out and we can be strong. No. I’ve played in too many important games. I’ve already played in the U.S. I was excited to play here, playing for Portland, at home. Everything was special of course, but no nerves. I just wanted to play and for everything to go well, but it didn’t work today...I don’t have words for that. I’ve never seen anything similar or close. After the game, even with it 5-0, they stay there and they just cheer throughout. This [performance] is not good enough. We can’t play like that and lose in front of our fans. They deserve a big team and we have to be great. Not good, we have to be great."

Defender Rachel Van Hollebeke

"It was just an incredibly disappointing game. You never want to ever lose like that, especially at home. I think the only thing we can do is just try to move on from it, try to learn from it. We’ve got to figure it out. We’ve got to be better. That wasn’t a good enough performance, and we are so much better than that so it was just very disappointing...I definitely think our team is in a little bit of a time of transition, and it will take a little bit of time to come together and really be a cohesive unit. That said, though, that’s still no excuse. I think that we’ve just got to come together as a team and really support each other, rally for each other, figure each other out as fast as possible and get better."