Tijuana 4-2 LA Galaxy / Cruz Azul 5-1 Sporting Kansas
Coach SKC Vermes reacts
And as long as the CONCACAF Champions League schedule matches up with Liga MX’s and conflicts with MLS’ season, Sporting manager Peter Vermes said, that discrepancy is going to pose a challenge for the latter league’s clubs in the knockout stage.
“You’re still getting your season started off, and you’re trying to get players trained for the quarterfinal round,” Vermes told reporters in a conference call from Mexico City on Wednesday night, after Cruz Azul went on a three-goal tear in the second half and cruised to a 5-1 second-leg victory and a 5-2 aggregate win in their quarterfinal series. “It is not an easy thing for any team in MLS.
“That team deserves what they got today. We weren’t good enough at the start of the game, and we weren’t good enough in the second half. You can go back and think about all kinds of things, but in the end, they were better than us tonight.”
“The second half, they were the better team. They were the better team. They opened us up.”
LA Galaxy forward Landon Donovan and coach Bruce Arena react
I think you see the difference in the leagues on nights like tonight,” Landon Donovan said. “We’ve got probably six, seven, eight guys who are mature, who know how these games are. They’ve got 20 guys who know how these games go. And that’s the difference between the payrolls”.
On winning CCL: “That’s why we (MLS teams) are not gonna … it’s going to be difficult to make that next step until we get on equal grounds that way so you can have the type of players that know how to handle these games.”
“Obviously, the game plan wasn’t to let two goals in in the first 10 minutes, and it’s a difficult game plan after that. Give credit to them, they came out flying”.
“They know how to play on their pitch, you know? With the artificial grass, they’re playing balls in behind us, and the ball was sticking, and they were getting to it first, and we came out sleeping a little bit.”
Bruce Arena
On Tijuana’s field: “They know exactly how to play on their turf. They were playing in behind us, where the balls stuck perfectly, and they were getting to every ball behind us. If going into that we knew how they played, I think we could have had a little bit different game plan.”
“Let’s be fair,” Arena said. “We weren’t good. How good they were, I don’t know. They were certainly better than we were.”
On the last CCL Quarterfinal San Jose Earthquakes lost to Toluca 1-1 (5-4 shootouts); so there are no more MLS teams in this Concacaf. Champions League One more time the Mexican predominance has been clear and with no contestation.
