Petke: Piatti phenomenal, RSL sloppy

Real Salt Lake’s 3-1 loss to Montreal Impact was plagued by two things: An inability to stop Ignacio Piatti (who can, really?) and a penchant for making mistakes in possession.

Here’s what RSL coach Mike Petke told reporters after the match.

Quotes were provided by RSL Communications in an official release.

We played a team tonight in Montreal who is firing on all cylinders. We prepared pretty heavily for them and Piatti still got two goals. He’s a phenomenal player and my hat goes off to him.

That second goal, in particular, was fantastic. Piatti has 14 goals in 19 matches played this season. It’s truly remarkable — and imagine RSL having a player that could produce that sort of output.

I think we were sloppy with the ball at times, at times we were good, and we didn’t do a good enough job with the transition game. Overall, we had a ton of chances as well, hit the post, certain opportunities and it just didn’t work so it’s off to Wednesday.

Yep. Well said.

It’s unfortunate to lose Marcelo five minutes in, when him and Justen’s partnership has been so great. It was a tough game for David Horst to come on and get right into the swing of things. It was bad for us that he had to come out of the game.

Seriously — you have to wonder how that match turns out with Marcelo Silva and Justen Glad finishing the match as a pairing. I don’t mean that as a blast at David Horst, Silva’s replacement — more, it’s always a blow when the defensive pairing that starts the match can’t even reach the 10th minute before an unfortunate injury.

I came in the locker room and I said what I had to say to get that behind us. We have a good mentality and we had a good stretch of six games before this and we’re now at home for two in a row. The mentality is, get this out of your mind, take the charter flight, get home, rested and a quick turnaround.

At the end of the day, that’s all you really can do, isn’t it?