CHICAGO FIRE MEDIA CONFERENCE

July 17, 2021

Frank Klopas

Press Conference

Nashville 5, Chicago 1

Q. Difficult evening, but what were your thoughts, takeaways from tonight's performance?

FRANK KLOPAS: Listen, right now at the moment, I think the first thing that's on my mind and the team's mind and the whole club and organization is with Rapha and his family and our thoughts, our prayers are with him. So that's just the first thing that's going through my mind right now.

And then the second thing is, look, I think when I look at this game, you cannot have a start like that. The first 15 minutes, I thought the game was over. We had a poor start, we go down 2-0 and you get a red card. That's the difficult one.

But the second half, I felt if you can take positives away from this game, I felt that we drew the second half with a man down and in the end I felt that the guys really never gave up. They fought hard to the end. Those are some of the positives of what I'm thinking right now in my mind and the other positive is that you have to regroup right away because we play a game on Wednesday and that's always a good thing is not to dwell on this too much.

Q. Coming out of a pair of strong performances at Soldier Field, how do you regroup Wednesday against D.C.?

FRANK KLOPAS: Yeah, you regroup, I think you have a couple days, two days, I think to go back and refocus, reorganize, put this behind us and look at some things that we need to obviously correct. It's about the next game and you have to move on, and obviously learn from this game and the start that we had, because, you know, the way we went into the match was not the attitude or mentality that we needed to have. I think that has to change, the players know, and we have to regroup. We have to have a good game plan going in and have a couple good days of preparation and put this behind us and just have another game; that I think all the players are eager to get back on the field and put the game behind us by the performance and the result on to the next one.

Obviously the fans were fantastic again. It was great for us to walk out and see the support from our supporters group coming out and supporting the team. That's always a positive, and I know that's always a tough one for all of us, because we always feel -- not that we lost but also that in a performance like this, you love the fans that traveled so far to be with us, but they were fantastic. They stayed, and we went out as a group together, and the support from them was great. And I know the players, all of us cannot wait to get back home to Soldier Field in front of them and be a lot sharper than we were tonight.