Austin 1, LA Galaxy 0
Q. Eriq, I'm pretty sure you keep hearing about the bad start to this year. You guys coming off a championship-winning season, just what are the vibes right now in the locker room? What's the message you told the team as you guys finished off this game?
ERIQ ZAVALETA: As you can imagine, this is a group that's expected to win and expects to win every week. And so we're frustrated. We're disappointed, and motivated to turn this thing around as quickly as possible.
So you know, our margins are a lot thinner than last year, and so every mistake is magnified, and we've seen that over the course of eight, ten games, whatever it may be.
And so the message is, we need to continue to improve, continue to put ourselves in situations to get a result. I felt like we did that tonight, and finish the job. Tonight we unfortunately didn't do that. So we'll have to continue on and try to get better.
Q. On the goal Austin scored, maybe a bit of an unlucky thing that Emiro's deflection leads the ball to Brandon Vázquez. Do you feel that might sum up the season so far where just luck doesn't seem to go your way?
ERIQ ZAVALETA: Yes and no. I don't know. I don't want to sum it up in one play. I understand what you're saying.
It's an incredibly unfortunate play. I think it's very easily covered in it's not deflected in the exact manner in which it deflected. That happens. That's what I'm talking about with margins.
But I think the more that we can do a better job to control games, to keep the ball out of our box, the less chances of those kind of things happening happen.
We're frustrated that it happened. J-Mac made a wonderful save to keep us in the game. We felt like we had the chances to punish them on the other end, and we didn't do it. That's football. That's the business of results.
And so we'll come out of this game and no one will care, and no one will know or remember that. They will remember we lost 1-0. We have got a week to prepare and go get things and win a game at home.
Q. You guys followed up a good performance against Tigres with a loss again RSL, and then a very gutsy performance last week with a loss today. Why do you think it's been difficult to put together consecutive, 90-minute performances? And how is the back feeling?
ERIQ ZAVALETA: First of all, my back is okay. It's fine. It's something I deal with every day. Certainly not getting younger but it felt good to be back out there. Felt good to contribute to the team.
In terms of the back-to-back stuff, I don't think there's any merit to it to be honest with you. I think we put a performance out there that was worthy to get a result today, again, and we didn't.
So whether or not that's because we had another gritty result right before, I don't put any stock in that. Kudos to the guys out there last week playing with ten men and playing with the kind of effort that they did to be able to get a result at home.
I felt like for stretches we did that today and for stretches we didn't. I don't find any correlation. I think we need to understand that that kind of effort is required for 90 minutes every single game for team to get results this year. I think we understand that. I think we understand where we are better than anybody else. We're motivated more than ever to continue to try to dig ourselves out of this hole, and we know that this is a long season.
But it's time to start putting results together. So we're motivated to comeback home with 11 men and put that kind of performance in to get a result that ends with a W and three points.
Q. The vibe in the dressing room last season was amazing. Do you feel like that transition has also resulted in perhaps the chemistry, the lack of chemistry with new players, really experienced players leaving? What's your thought on that?
ERIQ ZAVALETA: I don't think it has anything to do with vibes. We lost very good players who were very important to us. We lost our starting striker. We lost a starting midfielder. Like we lost our best player to injury.
Those aren't vibes. Those are credibly important players who we relied on last year. We have had to turn around and find a new identity and a new way to play this year with different players for the most part, and that's something that will take time.
But at the same time we have good enough players in this locker room. We are set up in a good enough way by the coaching staff to get results, and we haven't done it. That's on us. We know that.
It's everybody's job in the locker room to look ourselves in the mirror and ask, Am I doing enough? Have I been doing enough? What can I do to be better? That's what champions do.
We believe in ourselves more than anybody else. Doesn't matter what anybody thinks. We believe in ourselves, and we are going to continue to push on and prove that we're worthy of three points on a weekly basis and continuing to push on.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports