Vancouver 4, St Louis City SC 1
JOHN HACKWORTH: First of all, sorry for making you guys wait. We had to have a little come-to-Jesus moment in the locker room there.
The second thing is that that performance is embarrassing. It's not acceptable to our club, not acceptable with the city, not acceptable to the fans who invest so much time, energy, money into us.
So we're embarrassed and we have to own that.
I'll let you guys ask questions.
Q. Where did that begin? The players, you give an early goal, is it just from the very start, is it just not there?
JOHN HACKWORTH: No, not necessarily. Look, we have some problems, and I can't sit here right now and tell you exactly what it is.
But when you're playing a good team, and Vancouver is a good team. We know how they are going to try to play against us. If we don't -- if we aren't able to defend just the general ideas of what an opponent is going to do against us, we don't have a lot of chance to win an MLS soccer game.
I give our team a lot of credit for coming back into the game for getting an equalizer. That's two weeks in a row we did that and we'll try to build on that for sure.
But to give up one at the very end of the half, again, on a very, I would say predictable-type ball that should not beat us. And to have the heads go down and the body language; it's something, again, I don't want to sit here and tell you that I have all the answers right now because I don't.
But I don't want to defend things that aren't real and I want to make sure that I can look at the game film, talk to the players, talk to the staff and try to fix as much as we can in a short amount of time as we head into Seattle.
Q. The players response, presumably they saw what we all saw; it was not good.
JOHN HACKWORTH: Yeah, I think the players are embarrassed, too. But as the interim head coach, I have to take responsibility for that.
And we have to evaluate whether it was our tactics, whether it was something that we did or we did things differently, I'd be happy to talk to you about that if you want.
But at the end of the day, Vancouver is a team that plays a certain way and we have to be able to at least at a minimum collectively come together as a group and work towards that and that didn't happen for us.
Q. Might be more of the same of what you already said, but last week you said you were looking for progress and this match was strikingly similar to the loss last week in Colorado. Any things that you can point to off the top of your head that did feel like progress or is it one of those performances that you have to look at everything?
JOHN HACKWORTH: Yeah, there's not a lot you can point at as a positive. There's not.
Q. What are the options going forward here?
JOHN HACKWORTH: We are still a team that's not at full strength, and I don't want to make any discusses but we'll have more options heading into Seattle because we'll have a couple players coming back from injury and then we have a summer transfer window that opens, and we'll have players that we already brought in that will be available for Friday, or for Saturday in Kansas City, and that's the options.
But it starts on the training field. We have to get our mentality right we have to get the competitive nature of, these guys are good soccer players. There's no doubt about that but we have to bring them together, play collectively and then try to go out and show our fans, ourselves, that this kind of performance is not acceptable.
Q. Was there anything in practice this week that seemed that this might be in the offing?
JOHN HACKWORTH: Nothing on the field. Nothing on the field. I felt good about the practices. The guys certainly worked hard. Put in a good shift, that kind of thing. But at the same time, we have things wrong that we have to do a better job identifying, and again, I'm going to hold myself accountable for that.
Q. Defensively, the goals look like so many other goals where guys get loose and there's no one; Brian White gets his alone, which seems like that probably wasn't in the game plan.
JOHN HACKWORTH: Probably not. Probably not.
Q. So when you see those same things happening defensively, what does that say?
JOHN HACKWORTH: It says that we are not a very good team right now, quite candidly.
So so we've got to, I don't want to say too many clichés here. We didn't play well. That's not acceptable in this building, and we have to go fix it. The only way we can get better is by fixing one thing at a time.
We thought we had fixed those through the week. We felt really positive about it. I even felt positive at halftime; that despite giving that up goal late, we could get back into this game.
For about ten minutes in the second half, it felt like we could find the equalizer and put it on our he terms. That didn't happen for us. Then the other goals come, and those are not acceptable, and especially the reactions of the group.
Q. To focus on things individually, Nökkvi Thórisson has been a striker by necessity over the past month or so, but seems like he has shown some progress, especially with the two goals against the Whitecaps. Do you see him as a striker?
JOHN HACKWORTH: Yeah, I think Nökkvi, I don't want to say anything positive in this press conference, but there's not a lot to say. But if you look at Nökkvi, he's been asked to play out of position and done an admirable job of that and provided us with some goals.
So there is still positives in there. The problem is not necessarily any individuals. It's more of a collective. We're not a good team right now and we've got to fix that.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports