COLUMBUS, Ohio – Moments after suffering the largest collapse of his tenure with Columbus Crew SC, Gregg Berhalter told reporters at his postgame press conference that giving up a 3-0 lead that turned into a 3-3 draw against Toronto FC was “not at all” worse than any other loss or draw.
“Obviously, we’re not happy with it,” he said. “I can’t rank losses because you’re disappointed with every single one of them; I can’t rank ties when you’re up and you think you should win the game; all of them are bad. We’re not happy with any of them.”
But while Berhalter stuck to his one-game-at-a-time guns, his team seemed to disagree.
In a quiet, disappointed locker room, midfielder Justin Meram was asked about players adopting his coach’s philosophy of not letting this match hurt more than others.
“It’s an easy thing to say, but we’re all pissed right now,” Meram said. “We feel we should have had three points. But we can’t sulk on this. I’m sure guys are going to be pissed tonight, but tomorrow is a new day and we do what we have to do.”
Berhalter chose not to look at the draw as a blown lead. Instead, he said execution wasn’t there for the entire match.
“I look at the match as a whole, and I’ll say we’re disappointed,” he said. “The effort was certainly there, no question. The guys are exhausted; everyone worked as hard as they could. The execution wasn’t there, both on the offensive side and the defensive side, and we’re disappointed. If you go up 3-0 at home, you expect three points.”
But Meram, who said the team is “extremely devastated” said the comeback was a blur.
“I can’t even tell you [how the game changed],” he said. “Those three goals happened boom-boom-boom. … This is a tough one to swallow.”
Berhalter said his team wasn’t “brave enough,” and midfielder Wil Trapp used the same phrase in the locker room. It wasn’t a physical lack of bravery, he said, but a tactical one.
“It’s not easy to want the ball in hard spots,” Trapp said. “I think there’s a certain level of courage and bravery that goes into that, so that’s more or less what we’re talking about. For this, we can only blame ourselves.”
Meram expressed frustration that he and other players have, but said the team will rebound.
“We have to regroup,” he said. “We didn’t lose. We feel we should have won, but we’ve got to move on.”
The sellout crowd in Columbus will also have to move on. And for them, Trapp said he had only “an apology, more or less.”
“It’s frustrating for them; it’s frustrating for us as well,” he said. “We need to be better, we need to be better at home for them. This kind of lights the fire.”
