John Ellinger Game Quotations

Our younger players are getting better. That time in the senior games helps.

I figure that they're going to play hard, ... that they want to play and the veterans are going to have to play hard if they want to play the last few games of the season.

Story of the game was how many times can we turn the ball over in the midfield and created bad situations for ourselves defensively.

The key game for us is Wednesday (vs. Colorado in Denver). We have to close the gap with Colorado, if we don't then they're 15 points clear with five games to go. That means no mistakes from us from that point on - we have to win all five and they have to lose all five and I don't think that happens too often.

We need to get away from the road. I was hoping that this game would be the first time we would win on the road, but it's now 13 straight road games without a win. The answer has got to be out there somewhere, I just don't know what it is.

We feel -- and probably Chivas feels the same way too -- you definitely get punished for your mistakes. Good teams make the ball bounce their way and sometimes we get frustrated with it not happening for us. We've had a couple games where we've said, 'Nothing bad is going to happen, we're going to make our own breaks,' but to actually say that and then play that way, it doesn't always work out.

He's been a warrior. He's played some good games in a lot of pain, and I certainly appreciate everything Paul has given us to try and make us more competitive during this stretch.

We use the reserve games for a reason.

It's unrealistic to think about catching Colorado if you have to play two of those three games away and you haven't won an away game. Today would've been a nice place for us to start.

We try to reward those guys who play well in reserve games with time in the senior games.

We have two games left, we need to win an away game. We want to win, we don't want to finish the season with 12 straight losses.

We just have to play every game at this point on and just get a result, ... The playoffs are something you don't realistically want to think about at this point, you just want to do something to get a win.

If you are an opponent watching our game film, what are you going to do? You're going to higher pressure us and make us try and cough the ball up. So we have to get better at not coughing the ball up under pressure.

We're not playing poorly. Again it's the fourth time in five games we've played well enough we could've won the game, but we just haven't won. We just have to find ways to win games, what's been going on most of the year is we're finding ways to lose games.

The story of the game was how many times we turned the ball over in the midfield and create bad situations for ourselves. You just can't keep making those kinds of mistakes, giveaways, and we seemed to do that a lot.

It was a tough game and was going back and forth. You can look at the stats and the possession could have said 99 to 1 for Sierra Leone, but we weren't going to stop until the final whistle blew. That's what we said we were going to do at halftime. Any mistake they had we were just going to pounce on them.