This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Sandy — Real Salt Lake coach Jason Kreis wanted to talk about how well Minnesota played following the Stars' convincing 3-1 victory Tuesday night at Rio Tinto Stadium.Kreis wanted to praise the Minnesota tactics as well as how well the Stars crowded the midfield.But Kreis' anger and disappointment in his team's effort kept welling up instead. RSL's next game is June 16 at Los Angeles and woe to the player who slacks at all.For the next two-plus weeks, "I would not want to be a player under me right now," Kreis said."They just wanted to win more than we did, which is embarrassing. I think we owe a debt of gratitude and apology to, first and foremost, to our ownership and to the management for pulling strings and working extremely hard to get the match here. And we owe an apology to our fans, because that was a terrific crowd here for for an Open Cup match and we let them down miserably."The 17,212 fans is the largest for a non-final U.S. Open Cup match."We've been preaching the same message to our team for many, many years now," Kreis continued. "If they're not going to be fully committed to the game, they will not get results. Tonight they came in at 75 percent and thought that was going to be good enough and clearly it was not."— Martin Renzhofer