On his reaction to the performance as a whole:
“I’m proud of the boys. They played well, they did what they had to do to come into a difficult place to play and get three points, three goals, and a shutout. On this difficult road trip, I told them after the game that I thought we were growing, learning, and we got some points to boot.”
On what he attributed the slow start to:
“We didn’t start great. We started very conservatively trying to probe and figure out exactly how they were going to play and where we could take advantage of that. I wasn’t totally pleased with the start of it but I thought we grew into the game.”
On set-pieces being an advantage for his side lately:
[The goal] is a result of what we’ve been working on at the training pitch and we thought if we put the right service in the right spot in the box that we could get something out of our attacking set-pieces and fortunately we did.”
On McCabe’s goal:
“I’m happy that Jonathan [Lewis] got the assist but Niall [McCabe] had a lot to do when he received that ball and it was an excellent finish.”
On the debut performance by loanee Jonathan Lewis:
“We brought [Jonathan] in because we needed to rest guys and rotate our roster. Jonathan coming in and being here on only his fourth day, it was really an impressive performance by him because he contributed and did a lot of work and was successful in the end.”
On Greg Ranjitsingh’s performance tonight:
“If you take away the own goal and the penalty [in Pittsburgh], [Greg] has had two outstanding games back-to-back. I’ve been really impressed with him. I thought he was excellent in all phases of the game and managed it well. Clearly, he made big saves but he also came out and collected numerous different services into the box. It’s always an advantage when you have a goalkeeper who can come out and collect those and win some 1v1 duels.”
On squad rotation and player performance:
“When you rotate three of your defenders and you get a shutout, it certainly says a lot about the group as a collective. Sean Totsch came in and played really well, won numerous battles in the air and connected well. Shaun Francis has been in good form and continued that tonight, and Pat [McMahon], I thought was playing well and was probably a little unlucky to receive a red card. The red card ended up forcing us to do something that we needed to do better in our previous game on Saturday night, and clearly, we did better at that tonight. Also, Luke [Spencer] coming on … it would’ve been a lot to ask for Cameron [Lancaster] to continue to be pushed and Luke was huge for us tonight. Not only did he get the goal but his hold-up play was excellent, his work ethic, his ability to press and initiate a lot of what we did on the offensive side of things … that was the turning point for us, turning them over in their own half.”
On returning to Slugger Field on Saturday:
“The idea is that we learn from our experiences and we get better. We know that we have to get better at Slugger Field and we’ve all been disappointed in the lack of us getting points there even though we’ve felt like we’ve played some good games there. Our focus is on making sure that we control everything we can on our end and learn from our past experiences to put on another good performance on Saturday night.”
