On logging more minutes this year than any year prior:
“I wouldn’t say I’m striving for it but if the manager wants to put me in every game then I’m going to try my best and work as hard as I can for the team.”
On another brace:
“I’m just trying to get in the right spots and hopefully finish properly and thankfully everything is sort of going in for me at the moment.”
On his combination with Ilija Ilic:
“It’s nice because we’ve been together for the past 3 ½ seasons and so we’ve always trained together and been in the team together. I feel like we’ve always had a sort of connection but I feel like now that we’ve been able to finally play together more it’s showing.”
On his instinctual runs:
“I don’t really want to give too much away but, yeah, I mean I go where the space is and then hopefully try and finish if the ball is put through.”
On if his second goal (header) reminded him of the 2017 USL Cup winner:
“Yeah, quite a bit. I think the cup final one was a bit better but it was a good goal.”
On leading the Golden Boot race:
“I’ve had a hard career with injuries and just really trying to see the pitch so with me in this sort of position I’m happy with myself, but first and foremost is scoring the goals to get the points for the team.”
On what he saw after going down early on:
“It’s very frustrating for us as a team to be conceding goals like this. We’re a team that prides ourselves on our defending and especially on a night like tonight when I thought that coach Hack did a really good job of identifying [Charleston’s] threats yet we still did not deal with it the way we were supposed to. For me, that’s super frustrating to see and to add on top of it, after a game like Tuesday against Toronto then comes this, our fans deserve so much better and we’ve only given them one point in the last two home games and that’s just not where our standards are. That’s why this is frustrating for us right now.”
On if the home record as of late is creeping into the teams’ heads:
“No, it’s not. Obviously, it’s something that, with our fans being as great and supportive as they are, for us, we want to reward them at home. We play every game to win it. We don’t play games to draw. That’s what we try to do and especially at home.”
On the team’s resiliency:
“For me, I look at it and I think that, other than the Toronto game, I thought that we had been playing pretty well offensively but soccer is a sport where you need to play well both offensively and defensively. We’ve been getting our chances and obviously, Cam [Lancaster] has been crushing it; Illy [Ilic] and Luke [Spencer], George [Davis IV], and Niall [McCabe]—these guys have been doing a lot of good things in attack. When we score two goals in a game like that it should be enough. We need to make sure that we’re keeping that clean sheet.”
On what the key is moving forward for the team:
“I think, again, we just have to learn a lot from what just happened and move on and get ready because every game is big, but Cincinnati is bigger. That’s going to be a real treat for our fans and it’s one where we really need to perform well in.”
On the full week of rest and recovery:
“This last stretch of games has been a grind, but you know, it’ll be great for us to be able to get to full health but there is no excuse. We had plenty of energy, we had plenty of bodies, we rotated the squad… There’s no reason that we should’ve taken only one point in the last two games.”
