Real Monarchs 2 vs. 0 Wolves U-21s_
July 23, 2022; Rio Tinto Stadium, Sandy, UT
Real Monarchs (1-0-1, 5points); Wolverhampton Wanderers FC (0-1-0, 0 points)_
Head Coach Jamison Olave
On the strong defensive performance:
“It’s the consistency. Playing the same players over and over, they’re going to get to know each other. They’re going to get to know the different systems that we can play. That way it doesn’t matter the system, they know the movement, they know their teammates. That’s why we can see that kind of performance in the last two games. We are playing basically the same thing over and over, so that consistency is big for sure.”
On the depth of the bench:
“That’s very positive. When you want to make a sub, you want to make a sub that is going to help and impact the game. At the beginning of the season we didn’t have that. At times we had two or three guys on the bench that were there just for numbers. Today we can say that we had players that impacted the game. Zack [Farnsworth] from the first team he’s coming from a long injury now, we put him in and he was good. Yekeson [Subah] we put him in, he was good. We had a chance to play Jude [Wellings] for a couple minutes and he was good. We can see that consistency and how it’s growing, slowly, but it’s good.”
On the return of Zack Farnsworth:
“I’m pretty happy for him. He’s from the academy, signed to the first team, then got injured. It was a long injury but having him here, his first 20 minutes back at Rio Tinto, he should be even more happy than I am to be back out here after that long injury.”
Defender Zack Farnsworth
On his return:
“It’s honestly an unreal feeling. I miss it so much. It’s been the longest 15 or so months of my life. Just thank you God. I could not do this without all my family and friends supporting me. And all the coaching staff, training staff, they had my back 100% of the way. I'm just so thankful to be able to step back onto the pitch again.”
On how difficult it was to sit out for so long:
“It was brutal. Honestly, this is my life. This is what I want to do for an extended period of my life. I enjoy it so much. Missing that joy was so tough. My family, friends, and staff all came in very clutch, and they kept me excited for what’s to come. They kept me hopeful. Honestly I leaned onto my faith with God more than anything. That’s super important to me. Just knowing that he had a plan for me to come back onto the field was huge. I kept that in the back of my mind the whole time. I’m truly at a loss for words. It means so much.”
On his personal goals within the team:
“I just want to win. I want to get back healthy. I want to get back to 100%. I want to get back in form and everything like that but first and foremost I want to help the team anyway I can whether that’s with the Monarchs or the first team with Real Salt Lake. I’m so excited to keep stepping on the pitch more.”
Defender Golden Mafwenta
On his defensive performance:
“First of all, I just want to say thank you for the goal. I wasn’t expecting that. By God’s grace I did it and I was continuing working on that but thank God for that. The way we played, we played very well. My teammates in the midfield tightened up, the backline was solid. I'm happy about that.”
On his confidence and chemistry with the Monarchs:
“It’s just the mentality. The focus. It doesn’t matter, the passion you find out there. This is my first time playing outside of my home country, and I’m very happy to have found this family.”
Midfielder Tyrone Mondi
On his success on the left side
“First of all, thanks to the almighty for my talent. All glory to him. I play for God’s glory. Today was a good test. It was a different game from Chelsea’s. Chelsea were a little more high pressed, they were a little bit more compact. They were very compact in the middle so we had to find spaces out wide. I think that’s what we were looking at in the scouting was, if we have the ball on the one side they commit so many numbers on the other side to keep us there and we have to find the ball to rotate the ball as quick as possible to the other side. I think that’s what gave us success at the end of the day. We had a couple of crosses, a couple of opportunities. I could have scored at least two more. But I think its good momentum for the team going into the rest of the league games. Hopefully this can help us and we can build on it.”
On lessons for the rest of the season:
“You saw against Chelsea we conceded early and today we tried to minimize that, conceding early. It becomes a different game when you’re chasing it becomes a little bit more open, they get to exploit more spaces so being compact, defensively knowing our roles and that’s what the coaches have been implementing, trying to stay as compact as possible. Forcing them to make mistakes. Just playing to your strengths. Defensively that has helped us a lot. Going into the next few games, in the beginning of the season we had a few, I don’t want to say unfortunate moments, where we could have gotten at least a result out of it but it just slipped away from us. Now that we’re building into it, getting different formations down, players coming in and out, we’re getting good rotations. The younger guys are also coming in and contributing a lot. I think that’s just testament to what we did on the pitch.”
