With win, Fire not worried about Nowak's comments

Fire officials seemed unperturbed by comments Philadelphia coach Peter Nowak made after Saturday's game.

Nowak, a member of the Ring of Fire, said in his postgame press conference that he was surprised and disappointed that his former team played "with 10 guys in the back, behind the ball," adding, "I believe that in our league this kind of stuff is not supposed to happen. ... We have to work on how to break teams down who just rely on some individual's one maybe lucky shot."

"All the matches are different," Fire coach Carlos de los Cobos said Monday after practice. "Philadelphia is a good team. Peter is a very good coach. We need to add points. We need to be smart to play. I think in this last match we were very smart to play. Our team played very compact, very solid. We deserved the win."

Fire technical director Frank Klopas noted the Fire had more shots on goal than Philadelphia 6-2. The Fire won 2-1 on goals by Baggio Husidic, set up by a Patrick Nyarko sprint toward the goal along the endline, and Marco Pappa.

"Everybody sees it differently," Klopas said. "Our approach is always to play good soccer, but it's not always possible to do that. But we had a good game plan and you can see, even switching Patrick on one side, we wanted to expose his speed against their back line. The first goal you saw, Patrick used his speed and went by."

To Nowak's comment that Pappa's goal, which came when Philadelphia failed to clear a rebound of a Justin Mapp shot, was a lucky goal, Klopas said, "There's no lucky goals."

Veteran midfielder Logan Pause also preferred to let Nowak's comments go.

"That's fine," Pause said. "That's not for us to even worry about. We got a win and we got 3 points. We got the result we wanted. That's really all that we're worried about."

Break time: Saturday's game against Philadelphia marked the one-third point in the season for the Fire (3-3-4, 13 points), which hosts Colorado on Wednesday night before taking a few weeks off for the World Cup.

"We need to win (Wednesday)," coach Carlos de los Cobos said. "We need to add points, because if we add points we are very close to the other teams that are at the top."

"Wednesday is a huge game," added midfielder Logan Pause. "We're looking forward to it and then hopefully to get to decompress over the next couple of weeks and enjoy the World Cup."

The Fire didn't get a win in May, but de los Cobos sees progress.

"The team is maturing," the first-year coach said.

"You can look at the standings. Other than L.A., who's kind of run away with it, there's a lot of parity," Pause added. "There are some games we lost or tied that we felt we played well enough to win. But it's a process, and I think that's one thing that we're trying to keep in perspective. We're going to continue to try to get better throughout the year, and we feel like we're doing that."

Injury Ward: Injured right defender Tim Ward is back to jogging with his teammates as he works to return from a calf strain.

"Things are going well," he said after Monday's practice. "It's just got to get a little bit stronger. We don't have a league game after Wednesday until the 27th, so there's no reason to push it."

Ward hopes to be ready to return to full training when the World Cup break ends.