What was said after Atlanta United’s 4-0 win against Chicago on Georgia Tech’s Bobby Dodd Stadium:
Atlanta United manager Gerardo Martino
On Josef Martinez:
“In a game like today’s it’s difficult to talk about just one person. I’d rather talk about the team as a while. But it’s evident to us Josef is a great goal-scorer.”
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On the play before the red card in the 12th minute:
“That’s true. For the stretch in the second half I thought we played really well. We didn’t put the score at risk. We were able to manage the game better than they we have in the past. We had a good performance.”
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On adapting to this style of play:
“Just by training, training every day, by making mistakes and learning from them.”
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On Julian Gressel:
“The first time we saw Julian was at the draft. We thought he was a very good player. He understands the concept of the game really well. He’s dynamic. He’s been really good for us.”
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On the timing of the upcoming international break:
“When we have this time to train, we have to keep gaining trust in our style of play. After the game in Seattle we will know if it was a good or bad time for the break.”
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Michael Parkhurst
On the effect of the red card:
“I mean it definitely had an effect on the game but you know even given that, we started the game great. Perfectly. We wanted to make sure we came out with the right intensity and attitude. And we did that. We went up a goal early. The red card was due to our pressure and getting the ball in behind them…great ball from Julian in in behind and you know Joseph’s is really quick. Of course from that point forward, they’re going to defend lower than from the start the game so we knew at that point, we would dominate the game, we just had to make sure we were good on the counter attack.
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On the timing of the break:
“I won’t say it’s horrible time, but unfortunate. You know we’ve got a lot of momentum right now. Ten goals in two games. But it gives the guys a change to get some training in, work on some things you know we’ll miss just a handful of guys who will go with their national teams and we’ll be ready. You know it’s unfortunate, coming out of the break, we play on a Friday but you know it is what it is. We know that we’ve got a tough stretch of games coming up and we know we’ve got to get results.”
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On what the team needs to work on during the break:
“We need to always continue to work on our game. You know building up out of the back. You know I’m sure teams are going to watch these last couple of games and do things differently. Whether that’s high press us or drop even further and make it more compact. And you know you always have to evolve and work on things and differently we want to make sure we’re sound. That was our first shut out of the season and we want to get a few more of those. This week allows us to do all those things and get a couple guys even more healthy and fit and strong.”
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On the home-field advantage
“I mean the support has been just amazing you know we’re very fortunate that we’ve got this atmosphere to play in front of, you know we don’t want to take it for granted. We want to make this a real fortress and a place where teams dread to come to play. Even though players really look forward to playing in this atmosphere, we want to make sure that they come in here fearing us on the field and today was a good foot forward in the right direction”
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On the style of play:
“You know I think we made it that way early on in the game. With the early goal. With the red card. Those are the things that we forced. From that point on you just want to make sure you take care of the ball…you don’t let them to get the counter attack that they could be deadly on. We did a very good job of being patient and knocking the ball especially in the 2nd half and waiting for those opportunities to go forward.
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On the patience shown by the team:
“No. Not too patient. You know I think maybe even there were times in the first half where we weren’t patient enough. We turned the ball over a couple times. You know it’s tough. The guys want to get forward and play and score but you know you can wear teams down if you connect 30, 40 passes every poss. So we were able to do that a few times in the second half.
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On the yellow cards drew by David Accam:
“Just being aware. We made a point of emphasis before the game to make sure we don’t let him get ahead of steam running at us I thought Carlos did an excellent job at helping us out. Obviously Ty did a great job on him. You know we just wanted to make sure any time the ball turned over, we knew where David was because he’s an explosive player.”
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On scoring 11 goals in three games:
“I knew early on in preseason that we had some skill up there. When we did some offense defense things…defending against those guys is difficult. Really difficult. They combine very well. They’re always looking begin the line, technically very sound. So I’m not surprised that they’re having success, and we’re having success offensively abut you never know when you get into the games and so it’s good that we’ve found that rhythm in these last two games.”
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Goalkeeper Alec Kann
“We were really organized. We knew that they were going to counter us. They have a lot of pace. Accam is very dangerous and we did a good job of kind of fazing him out the game. So we executed our game plan really well.”
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On spaces in the defense:
“I just try to keep myself in the line of the ball and the goal. But I’m in a position to play out if the ball comes back to me. From there, I can usually see in between the lines where the ball needs to go. It’s just a matter of executing it when that happens.”
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On his view from goal:
“It’s tough to break down 10 men. I mean they’re going to be organized, compact. We did a really good job of moving the ball and moving off of the ball and that is why we had success. Everyone put in a great performance.”
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On going into the break:
“Yeah, it’s huge. We have momentum, two straight wins. We shut out today, so I couldn’t ask for a better result going into a bye week.”
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On what the team needs to work on going into the break:
“Yeah, we are still a group that is relatively new. We need to continue to work on our organization, especially before going on the road. We are going to be playing in some hostile environments so we need to have that synergy where we can move without having to actually say something.
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On Josef Martinez:
“My goal every game is to keep a clean sheet, but when we score four goals it does definitely make my job easier. I mean Josef is a handful, he is going to talk this ship by a storm for sure.”
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On the fact that the team has yet to play a typical game:
“MLS games are usually not typical if that is any indication. They are always strange, they’re always competitive, and that is probably how it will be most of the year.”
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Midfielder Julian Gressel
On the first goal:
“I don’t want to call it my first goal but I just saw the space and ran in and told Tito to play it to me and he did and you know it just figured I’d play it in a dangerous position. And luckily someone deflected it and just went in. I don’t know if someone was behind one of our players or not but I just thought that putting it back in a dangerous position would give us a better chance to shoot.”
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On his start:
“I know what I can do. I know that I can be out there and I think I deserve it. I think I played all right so far. Obviously, it’s great that he trusts me with a starting role and I still try to learn a lot every day and get better.”
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Chicago Fire manager Veljko Paunovic
"First of all, I want to thank our fans who came here to support us and apologize obviously for the loss. Also I want to congratulate Atlanta. A great game and win. And wish them good luck for the future.
“For us, this was a hard lesson that we learned and we have to fix a lot of things. But I also want to appreciate the effort and hard work that all of our team had. Playing with a man down – 10 men – it’s never easy, and even more difficult when you don’t have a good result. So we move forward. We are looking to our next three games at home as very important games and we have to prepare better, we have to do a better job.”
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On the red card:
“I think the game very early started bad for us and we weren’t capable of reacting and adjusting. But it’s the part of the game. The game is behind us and all I have to say is that we have to do better, we have to learn from this, and improve.”
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On Duluth’s Daniel Johnson:
“Fantastic. We are very happy with Daniel Johnson. He is doing very good. He is improving. He is earning the opportunities hard in the training, but also there are more guys who are doing the same. And we believe today, just circumstances weren’t good for him to play, but at some point we expect that he will have the opportunity. He just has to keep training well and when we have our friendly games, to do his best, to show a good performance, and get the confidence for him and get the confidence for the coaches. So we just keep working with him and the rest of the guys and hopefully we can have good players in the future.
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Chicago Fire midfielder Juninho
“It’s tough when you don’t get a result. It’s hard to say something, but we had a system to start, we tried to score on the counter but their team was better today. We lost a guy in the beginning of the game and it made everything complicated. But you have to move on, you have to adjust on what we did bad in this game and move on to the next one.”
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