Inter Miami visited Chicago Fire FC at Soldier Field for the first time in Club history. The team lost 1-0 to the Fire in a hotly contested matchup.
Head Coach Phil Neville was critical of the teams’ performance and discussed the importance of winning the on-the-pitch battles in order to get desired results.
“I thought from the very first whistle they were sharper than us to every ball… we all want to play beautiful fútbol, we all want to get the ball down and play through the phases and create beautiful goals. But in fútbol you’ve got to win the battle first, you’ve got to stay on the runner, you've got to win the headers, you've got to win the tackles, you've got to be disciplined, you’ve got to defend well. If you don’t do that, you don’t win games of futbol,” said Neville.
Despite being critical of the teams’ overall performance, Neville once again praised John McCarthy’s heroics throughout the match, as well as giving credit to substitutes Christian Makoun and Julián Carranza.
“John McCarthy was probably our best player today in terms of the saves that he made, if it wasn’t for John, we probably would have lost by two, maybe three goals. There is no criticism of John McCarthy from me… Christian Makoun was brilliant when he came on, Julián Carranza was as well.”
Ryan Shawcross mirrored Neville’s comments regarding the team’s attitude throughout the game.
“Fútbol is a very simple game and if you got a better attitude than your opponents and more desire and more hard work, then usually you come out on top. Today, I thought they had that in abundance and we really struggled. We had moments in the first half where we came through that and we showed dominance. If you don’t start the game like that you’re going to struggle. We can talk about how we want to play, what we have to do, and where we want to go but it all comes back to hard work. I don’t think today was a great example of how you win games and how you win games in your life,” said Shawcross.
“When you win a game, you want to take the confidence of the previous game to the next one. You don’t want to get overconfident. If you want to be a successful team, you got to start games well and got to start games with a great attitude, hard work, dedication, and a willingness to win and a willingness to do hard work, it’s a simple process. Any team that’s been successful in the world is successful because of hard work. It’s such a simple, simple thing to do and today we didn’t offer that, so very disappointed, something we can work on. But overall, we have to remember we are a very new team, new squad, new manager. It’s going to take time but we need the fundamentals to be successful.”
