Kreis: We have to be pretty darn proud and I hope people are proud of us

By Ryan Scally, Rocky Mountain Correspondent

After falling to Monterrey 2-3 in the CONCACAF Champions League final, Real Salt Lake players and coaches had a chance to reflect upon the match and the disappointing loss.

All quotes are courtesy of the RSL media department.

See full match recap here.

REAL SALT LAKE HEAD COACH JASON KREIS

Overall thoughts on the match:

“It’s a quite foreign feeling to us to lose a match at our place, it hasn’t happened to us in a long time.  You have to continue to be proud of what we put into this tournament and the fact that we made it to this final, I think we need to take some pride in that.  Ultimately though I’m very disappointed we couldn’t take that final step.”

On the absence of Kyle Beckerman:

“I do think Kyle’s presence could have been a difference.  Kyle is an extremely important player, not only with how many defensive plays he makes for us, but how active he is in our possession. But everybody gave it their best, and we had a good enough team out there to win so I’m not using that as an excuse.”

Thoughts on how the conclusion of the tournament reflects on the team and MLS:

“I would hope that people would judge us based on the tournament and not on tonight.  Yes, this was a huge, huge opportunity gone missing.  And we feel deeply sorry about that.  But judge us over the entire tournament and I think we have to be pretty darn proud and I hope people are proud of us.”

On putting the match behind and moving on:

“From my point of view, we’ll see what kind of people we are now. You know, it’s a really easy task to talk about how good everybody is and how happy we are and all those sorts of things, when things are going our way.  So now we have this major, major disappointment; let’s see how we respond.”

REAL SALT LAKE GOALKEEPER NICK RIMANDO

Thoughts on the match:

“These kinds of games can either break a team or make a team stronger, and I think our team is strong enough to know that this isn’t going to break us up.  We’re going to stay strong and keep on preaching about how we’re a good team and deep team, and how the team is the star.  Right now this is an account of when there’s a tough loss to rebound and forget about it and go on with our season.”

On Monterrey’s goal:

“Defensively we did everything we could. There’s that one play that we didn’t do so well on and they capitalized on it. It’s that one at the end of the half or the end of the game, when we take so much pride to finish out and get to the locker room or to finish the game. That’s the time that we messed up and took a play off, and it’s one play that can kill you.”

REAL SALT LAKE DEFENDER TONY BELTRAN

On the result and moving on:

“[Onwards and upwards] is obviously our goal.  Whatever happened, you can improve on it tomorrow.  This is obviously a huge disappointment, but we’re going to have to pick ourselves up and focus on the task at hand, which is that we still have a few championships to play for this year.”

On the crowd:

”I can’t say enough about the crowd. They were fantastic.  I’ve never been so excited to play a game coming out of the locker room; even for warm-ups, the entire crowd was pretty much there.  It was awesome.”