Orlando City head coach Oscar Pareja
On forward Duncan McGuire’s performance in his first professional start
"I am very pleased. He is a young kid and very committed with the group. He is an American player who came up through the college system, which is fantastic. He has proven he is ready in his first game, so we are very happy for him."
On keeping the same intensity throughout the long stretch of games and balancing the busy schedule
"Sometimes you need to choose. What do you want? Do you want consistency with the lineup and the players that are competing in the First Team or the main competition that we just had in this leg for the Champions League and try to advance? We still have two games in Major League Soccer, so you normally think that you might make the players take off, but we want to choose consistency as we have to play them, even if we may not have them in this one game. Now, we choose to go in another direction which is making everyone belong and get minutes from every player and getting contribution from players who may not be a regular in the starting lineup. Players that have just come in who are in the lineup now too. So, we are gaining that. We are gaining that we are having a deeper roster. All these changes are not just personal, but they are made for the model and structure as well. It is good in some things, but sometimes you feel like in the first half today, where we don’t look like us. I don’t blame the players. I just think they are trying to adjust.”
On Dagur Dan Thórhallsson and his performance
“Dagur is fantastic news for us. He is a player that is very young, but adapted to our system and to the league. He knows this is a job. He wanted to just come in and play and play 90 minutes against a top team and he did really well. We are happy with him. He is making a good contribution and surely he is going to keep helping us.”
On the second half and if he expected the game to open up the way it did
“We did expect the game in the second half to have more volume and more action in front of the net. We knew the defense from the first half would reveal some possibilities because we played with one more defender and one less attacker, but we wanted to have solidness. We wanted to see if we could create more sequences around, in the flanks. I think we did with maybe not as much consistency. In the second half when we made the change of the model and we made the change of the personnel, we knew that this was going to surprise D.C. When that happened, I thought we looked much better. I think we had a couple more actions, we scored a goal and we accomplished that objective.”
Orlando City forward Duncan McGuire
On scoring his first professional goal
“It's definitely something you dream of as a as a kid. So definitely, it's exactly what I thought it would be. It was an unbelievable experience and I hope it's the first of many.”
On how he felt going into the match
“I definitely felt confident. I definitely went in with the mentality today that I was going to score. I was feeling good when I woke up this morning, so I’m definitely glad that it happened. But yeah, I definitely felt good about the game.”
On how he’s adapting to the league
“It's definitely a step up from where I've come from, but it's everything that I've expected it to be. The standards that they hold us to are very high, but it's definitely a fun team to be around and they make it very enjoyable. We're definitely hungry as a team and we're excited as the season goes on.”
On the amount of rotation amongst the group
“It's definitely good to get everyone minutes on the team. It definitely helps later in the season if there's injuries or someone can't play for a suspension. It's good to get minutes under the guys’ belts to get them game ready for whenever their names are called. I think it's definitely worked out well for us today and it's a good plan by the coaches.”
