Portland Timbers 2-2 Sporting Kansas (7-6 penalty shootouts)
Reactions after the game:
Timbers head coach Caleb Porter said
“It’s the tightest window we have played in all year. To be honest with you, I don’t like the format. We play Thursday, and we are three seed. I don’t know why that happened. It is what it is. No one cares about the format. They care who goes on. So we are going to find a way to get it done.
We have to take the positives with us and correct our mistakes. We have to start focusing. We just get three or four days after 120 minutes, so we have to be clever now and be smart with what we do. I expect everybody to just go home and rest now.
No doubt the guys will be ready. No doubt they will be turned around once the whistle blows, the adrenaline goes, they won’t feel it. We’ll be ready.”
Sporting KC coach Vermes:
“We should have been a little better. But that’s experience. It reminds you – I shouldn’t say it’s experience. You make a mistake, and you learn from it, and I think we’re going to learn from that one.
I think our performance, execution, everything was fantastic,” he said during the call. “I really do. I think the effort, the ability to play away from home and take this game to 120 minutes and PKs was huge by them. Great performance. They have nothing to be down about, other than the fact that we’re not moving on. They worked hard in the game, to come from 1-0 down and go up 2-1.”
We won the US Open Cup, great, but that was over with. It’s done with. We were in pursuit of now an MLS Cup. There’s no doubt that we’re going to be very disappointed in the fact that we didn’t move on. I think we did enough to do that but at the same time we didn’t finish at the end and that’s the way it goes sometimes.
“We’ll learn from it and move on, and those experiences are good too. It helps you grow as a team, as a club and as individual players too.”
