Ben Olsen On DCU's Preseason Loss To Impact: 'We Got Smacked In the Face'
Ben Olsen On DCU's Preseason Loss To Impact: 'We Got Smacked In the Face'
Both Ben Olsen and Wayne Rooney said on Tuesday that the loss to the Montreal Impact might be what D.C. United needed ahead of the 2019 season.
D.C. United head coach Ben Olsen sent out a strong starting lineup last Saturday against the Montreal Impact in his team’s last tune-up before their opening game against Atlanta United. Most of that group had started the previous Saturday against the Tampa Bay Rowdies and on the Wednesday between the two games against the Philadelphia Union.
Neither of those performances were perfect, but there wasn’t anything glaring on the field that would have indicated that United were going to get smacked around by the Impact, 3-0. On Tuesday at Audi Field, as D.C. gets ready to host the Five Stripes, Olsen said that the performance served as a wake-up call to his side.
“It didn’t end on a good note,” Olsen said of the way the preseason camp came to an end. “I think it was a good thing, because we got smacked in the face a little bit.”
That doesn’t mean that Olsen views the loss as a sign of what is to come this season, when United expects to get back into the playoffs again. But the lackluster performance, which saw the Black-and-Red muster just one shot in the opening 45 minutes, caught the attention of club captain Wayne Rooney as well.
“The Montreal game was very disappointing from a player’s point of view,” Rooney said in a press conference on Tuesday. “We didn’t play well at all, but also, a bit of the fight in the team wasn’t there.”
Of course by the end of preseason, players might be itching to get back home or more focused on the meaningful games that are on the horizon. So a subpar performance in a preseason game, even against an MLS opponent, shouldn’t be scrutinized too closely. For Rooney though, the fight that he said was missing against the Impact was part of what made United so successful at the end of last season, and what they’ll need to succeed in 2019.
“We need to fight in every game, like we did towards the end of last season,” said Rooney. “[The loss is] a wake-up call, a reminder to us as a squad that if we want to achieve good things this season, we have to make sure we’ve got that fight in every game.”