CHICAGO FIRE MEDIA CONFERENCE

July 20, 2022

Federico Navarro

Press Conference

Q. Federico thanks for making time for us this afternoon. We really appreciate it. How different is the mood around the team now as opposed to a week ago when you were coming off the tough loss to Columbus?

FEDERICO NAVARRO: Thank you very much. I think that we are doing really well. Emotionally, we are all doing really well. I think you can see that right away we recovered from that game, and against Toronto we played a good game and we did the same thing against Seattle. So I think we are doing well for the games that are coming up.

Q. Coach spoke about a chat that you all had and that you sat down together and looked at your mistakes and were correcting issues or looked at what could be better. Has the team in your opinion been able to correct those mistakes?

FEDERICO NAVARRO: Yeah, after that poor streak that we had, we all sat down together and started looking at the video. We saw what mistakes we were making, all the errors, little errors that we were doing, and how we could be better, how we could have a little bit more attitude, a little bit more spark in some plays. Maybe when it came to scoring goals or on the defensive end. We all sat down and looked, and everyone was kind of on auto critic, self-critical of each other so that we could go in and see what we've been doing and see how we could fix our mistakes. That could really help us as we were self-critical and that has really helped us moving forward.

Q. How do you feel you've grown as a player since you've arrived in Chicago and as a player in this league?

FEDERICO NAVARRO: I feel great. I think I've been feeling good. I wasn't able to start at the beginning of the season because of a small injury. But ever since then, I've been feeling better and better, gaining more rhythm and there are still a lot of things that I have to improve on but the team has been helping me with that. So I feel every day, day-to-day, I feel 100 percent.

Q. How do you like playing an artificial turf, which you'll be doing Saturday night, and how much does that affect your game?

FEDERICO NAVARRO: I'm indifferent about it. A soccer player always prefers to play on natural surface but it's not going to affect anything. I don't think it's going to affect the team, either. So it's all the same to me.

Q. (If Gastón is not able to play, who else do you feel would complement you?)

FEDERICO NAVARRO: Yeah, it's unfortunate that maybe Gastón won't be able to play in this game but I think everyone maybe who has not been playing as regularly like Mauri can come in and is a perfect fit. I think that Mauricio and I, like Gastón and I, we all work really well together and we all complement each other really well. He can do it as well as I can do it. Going in, we complement each other really well, so it will be just fine.

Q. What are you expecting from Vancouver and their approach to the game?

FEDERICO NAVARRO: I think what we've seen from them is that they are a team that likes to pressure a lot but they also wait in their half on their end.

So what we've seen is that they let you kind of propose things and work on your game, so now we are working on looking at what their difficulties are and then on our end, we are adjusting what we have been doing so that we can go in and play well and we'll try to have a good game.