Fire Get First Victory After Miami Howler

CHICAGO, IL-Some firsts for the Chicago Fire! It’s their first win of the season and they scored their first goal dating back four matches ago against Atlanta on April 24th.

It was also the first meeting between Chicago and Inter Miami CF on Saturday afternoon as Luka Stojanovic scored his third goal of season and lifted the Fire past Inter Miami CF 1-0 at Soldier Field.

 “You can also see that we’re all a little bit showing a bigger smile while sitting here,” Chicago Fire head coach Raphael Wicky said. “No, look, that’s why we do this job, that’s why we play; that’s why the players play, that’s why the coaches coach. In the end, you want to win every game and that’s the feeling you have, it’s obviously just super nice. I’m very, I mean, we have one win so I want to be, I don’t want to go too high but the way the team responded after four losses was really, really good, and I’m really, really, happy about that.”

The Fire (1-4-1, 4 points) entered the match positive with the thought of going after a home victory and its first win.

“They came out with energy, came out with confidence, immediately tried to be active and take this game in our hands and create, with the ball and without the ball being very active, that was just very, very positive,” Wicky said.  “Because, the ones of you who are athletes, who do sports, who have played on a certain level, when you do lose your confidence, yeah, your confidence goes down very quickly. And then, sometimes you come out and things don’t go smoothly. Today, I’m really happy with the way the guys responded and I’m really happy that they actually got rewarded for a very good game.”

Chciago saw its first goal, which lasted for 383 minutes of being scoreless. It felt like it was a long time coming for the club.

“Yeah, we actually talked about that and this was one of my points to the team,” Wicky said  “I said, guys, sometimes in football, we cannot explain. Sometimes, everything goes in and you score; and then sometimes, you have periods when things don’t go in, even if you play and I think we hit five times already, to the post or to the crossbar before this game and sometimes you don’t know why. So I said, we just have to keep believing, keep working and at one point, the ball goes in; maybe it’s a deflected shot, maybe it’s an own goal, we don’t know why. That’s what happened today. So sometimes, I just believe you have to keep having a positive energy, keep working, keep working hard and then things will turn around.”

Stojanovic entered the match in the second half at the 59-mintue mark. He made his presence known about 10 minutes later. He took a free kick from about 30 yards out, bounced it in front of the keeper John McCarthy. It twisted its way off his hands and into the goal.

Inter Miami CF (2-3-2, 8 points) had its chances to at least pull out a road draw or a victory, they couldn’t stay with Chicago for the most part.

“I thought from the very first whistle, (Chicago) was sharper than us to every ball,” Neville said. “We all wanted to play beautiful futbol, we all wanted to get the ball down and play through the phases and create beautiful goals. But in futbol you’ve got to win the battle first, you’ve got to stay on the runner, you’ve got to win the headers, you’ve got to win the tackles, you’ve got to be disciplined, you’ve got to defend well. If you don’t do that, you don’t win games of futbol.”

Inter Miami CF will be on the road for its next game at DC United, Saturday, May 29th at 8 p.m. ET, while Chicago will host CF Montreal at 12 noon CT next Saturday.

CHI – Luka Stojanović (unassisted) 69′