New York City FC were held to a third-consecutive home draw by Montreal Impact on Saturday afternoon.
For goalkeeper Sean Johnson, it was a disappointing result but he believes that hard work, a positive mentality and working to analyse what's not clicking is the way to turn around a tough start to the season for the Boys in Blue.
“It’s a tough one, I honestly think if we had the answers, we would have turned a lot more of these results into wins,” said Johnson. “Obviously we’re working hard every day, that’s all we can really do, just continue to put our best foot forward as players and try to find a solution. At the end of the day right now, it is just not clicking, and we just have to stay positive.”
Johnson’s attitude, and his presence on the pitch - coming away with his second clean sheet of the season vs. Montreal, shows exactly why the keeper was voted this season’s first Etihad Player of the Month title.
Although the season has has had a slow start for NYCFC, everything is still to play for, with 29 games still to come in the Regular Season.
However, Sean is eager to put things right as soon as possible, starting with the road trip to Minnesota.
“It’s a tough moment for us because we know we’re better than where we are on the table and better than what the results are. We can say we have next game, we can say it’s early in the season but I think we’ve got to take a real look,” said Johnson. "I’ve been in situations before where it starts happening over and over again before you know it, you’re close to August and the end of the season where playoffs start.”
The heavy defeat to Toronto left some tough questions to answer for the Boys in Blue and while the team wasn't able to get the win vs. Montreal, the desire was certainly there from the home team, according to Sean.
“After the Toronto performance, we were challenged internally, ourselves, we knew it wasn’t good enough. We wanted to come out today and take it to Montreal, but we came up short - but it’s for no lack of effort, you do what you can control what you can, and we’re trying to figure out what that is,” added Johnson.
“We’re going out and fighting every game, we want to win games, it’s no lack of effort going in. We have our hard hats on, going in every day to training. We have to really get back to it and top-to-bottom look to fix it.”
It's been more than 200 minutes since NYCFC's last goal but newly-acquired striker Héber showed promise on his debut, playing the final 17 minutes and taking three shots.
Anton Tinnerholm held high praise for the new striker, believing that the Brazilian may be the missing piece of the puzzle.
“We missed a striker so, of course, it’s going to be very important for us. He looked good today, and hopefully, he can get the start in the next one and we’ll go from there,” said Tinnerholm. “We have to create more chances, that’s the only thing we can do. For the moment, we keep controlling the game all the time, but we don’t create many chances so that’s something we have to work on next week.”
The Boys in Blue are fighting for their first win of the season heading into next weekend's test in Minnesota. Stay locked in for more - #ForTheCity!
