CHICAGO FIRE MEDIA CONFERENCE

May 7, 2022

Ezra Hendrickson

Press Conference

Atlanta United 4, Chicago Fire 1

Q. Just wanted to ask about two players very briefly. With Chris Mueller, what was the plan to manage his minutes coming into the game and coming off the bench, and for Jairo Torres, are there any updates on his injury and when was the decision made that he wouldn't be involved today?

EZRA HENDRICKSON: Yeah, so I don't have any updates as far as when Jairo will be back. Hopefully sooner rather than later but I can't give you a definite right now.

The decision was made I think Thursday when we decided that he couldn't train; that it's probably best that we leave him out for this game. Hopefully by next week or the following week, he's ready. But I don't have a timeline for that. Hopefully like I said, sooner rather than later.

As far as Chris, his first game we wanted to make sure we get him in, get some minutes, because he's been playing but he has not had a 90-minute game in a while, so we wanted to be careful about that and make sure we bring him in slowly. Make sure he doesn't get any injuries there. I thought he came in and did well tonight. That was a bright spot in tonight's game.

Q. I mean, what was the reaction with the team after going behind early, do you think? What could have maybe have been done better? Obviously there was the goal, but after that, kind of I'd say the performance dropped off. So what could have been better with the reaction in the first half?

EZRA HENDRICKSON: I thought immediate reaction was good, tying the game after that. But after that, we were just a step slow to everything. We were late to everything, including the first goal. We were just one or two touch by them and we were just late. We weren't shifted over and that hurt us.

What I told them is basically you can't come to another team's house and spot them three goals because it's very, very hard to get back from.

But I thought the immediate reaction, getting that goal back, tying up 1-1 was good, and then we slacked off that first half.

The second half, we adjusted some things defensively but we stepped up, we pressed, we won a lot of balls. Got a lot of turnovers in their final third. But we just made either a bad decision on the ball or just poor quality with our passing. We just turned it back over right way, and you can't do that.

I think when you're down like that and you get a turnover like that that close to the goal, you have to really, really have some quality and put the ball in the back of the net. There's an instance on a restart on our corner, ball comes back over, we have three guys naked, you know, and this is five, ten minutes into the second half and we can't put that away.

So we gave ourselves opportunities to tie the game up. We just didn't have the quality to do it in the expend then that fourth goal by the end, the game is over.

But immediate response in the first half was good. Then we slacked off again. Wasn't getting tight. We adjusted some things at halftime and I thought defensively we did well. Put ourselves in position with our turnovers on our press. But just didn't -- we made bad decisions once we won that ball or the immediate pass, we turned it right back over. These are some things that we've got to improve on.