By: Riley Pollock – 01.01.25
Hear what the Roughnecks had to say following their home–opener battle with the Vancouver Warriors.
Josh Sanderson on building off of a strong third-quarter:
“That’s how we want to play. We want to be physical, we want to control the ball, we want to have emotion and I thought we did that really well in the third quarter. Why does it take a team going up on us three or four goals for that to happen, it’s something that I’ve got to fix.”
On the Rough House:
“The crowd was great, they deserved a better effort from us than that. They tried to will us in the game a little but when we started popping off a few in the third. Give (Vancouver goalie Aden) Walsh some credit, he made some big saves when we were trying to make it a little tighter.”
On what went wrong:
“We’ve got to move the ball. We’ve been saying it from the start, move the ball. When it only touches one or two sticks and then we shoot it’s not successful. Once everyone starts sharing itwe seem to be popping them off no problem. My job again, I’ve got to get our offence moving the ball a little bit better.”
Curtis Dickson on being back at the Rough House:
“It was cool getting back out here, I mean the fans didn’t disappoint. However many it was out here … I wish we just put on a better show for them.”
On trying to battle back again:
“It would be nice if we could do that in the first half before we are down by whatever it is, four, five, six goals. That’s kind of how we have been shooting ourselves in the foot this year. We’ve been fortunate enough to fight back and win the first two but we can’t keep doing that to ourselves, it’s too hard to win games like that in this league. Obviously it bit us in the butt tonight so we’ve got to figure out a way to have better starts and get out and hold some leads.”
On Sanderson taking the blame on himself:
“That’s Shooter’s character. He’s going to come out and put that on himself but at the end of the day we’re grown men. We know what it takes to win and what we have to do. Especially offensively, that first half effort was pretty unacceptable, I think. The coaching staff put a game-plan in front of us and I don’t think we executed it at least in the first half and it showed on the scoreboard. That’s on us to execute that and be able to keep us in games early.”
