CARSON, Calif. – LA Galaxy defender Sean Franklin said he usually likes to go home after games and watch a replay, but he didn’t do that after Saturday’s emotional 4-3 loss to the San Jose Earthquakes at Stanford Stadium.
That’s how disappointed he and the rest of the Galaxy still feel about the defeat, in which the MLS-leading Earthquakes rallied from a first-half, 3-1 deficit in front of an enthusiastic Stanford Stadium crowd of more than 50,000.
“The easy way out would be to blame the ref and say he missed a few handballs,” Franklin said. “But at the end of the day we weren’t good enough.”
Now, however, it’s time to move on to Wednesday’s game at The Home Depot Center against the struggling Philadelphia Union (7:30 p.m., KDOC, KWHY, lagalaxy.com/gamedaylive).
But not before a little more soul-searching. Head coach Bruce Arena, approaching his fourth decade as a coach, said losses like Saturday’s don’t get any easier to handle despite the number of games on his resume.
“I don’t like losing games,” he said Monday. “I don’t know how you want to translate that into whatever that means. I don’t like losing games.”
Landon Donovan said the setback, which snapped a three-game winning streak for LA, was – and still is – difficult to handle.
“We’re all frustrated by it and disappointed,” said Donovan, who scored his team-best sixth goal of the season on Saturday. “But we know where we went wrong. Good or bad we have to move forward.”
Donovan said there were a number of positives to be taken out of the latest edition of this long standing rivalry.
“We did lot of good things on Saturday,” he said. “Three weeks ago we would have had no chance to win that game, and we should have won that game.
“We know what we did wrong. We had probably three or four individual mistakes and we got punished for it. All that being said, we were still in the game at the end and we probably should have had an equalizer.
“It’s just the way it goes. We’re not going to lose too much sleep over that. We’ve got to keep going.”
Franklin said this week’s busy schedule actually could work in the club’s favor. They’ll have just three days between the San Jose and Philadelphia games, and then they leave Friday for Chicago, where they take on the Fire on Sunday in an afternoon kickoff at Toyota Park at noon PT.
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“It’s good to not think about (Saturday’s) game so much, learn from it and move on to the next game,” he said. “I think it’s good we have a game so soon on Wednesday.
“It’s all about forgetting about the game against San Jose and worrying about our next one.”
