Adrian Heath demands more after Orlando City top NY Red Bulls 3-2

CHAMPIONSGATE — Orlando City Soccer Club may have walked away with a victory over the New York Red Bulls, but Lions head coach Adrian Heath was not that pleased with the team’s performance.

Goals from Ricardo Kaká, Adrian Winter and Pedro Ribeiro saw the Lions edge the Red Bulls 3-2 on Wednesday morning at the ChampionsGate Sports Complex.

“As pleased as I was at Jacksonville, I thought today was very poor,” Heath told reporters. “Our body language was poor from the beginning. Didn’t look like we were ready to come and play. I thought our second group was a little better. It looked like it meant something for the second group, and it did.”

There weren’t any halftime changes for the Lions, but as the game entered the second half, Orlando squared off against the Red Bulls’ second team headlined by Mike Grella. It wasn’t until Heath made a complete lineup change did Orlando City take more control of the game and, eventually, the result.

“It was disappointing,” Heath added. “Yeah, Orlando won 3-2, but that scoreline doesn’t paint a true picture of what the game was. It just looked like [the Red Bulls] wanted to win the game more than we did, and that shouldn’t happen. The problem wasn’t anything to do with fitness — it had to do with attitude.

“All in all, it’s been probably a wasted day.”

While Heath mostly pointed at how poorly the team played on Wednesday, the Orlando City coach praised goalkeeper Joe Bendik, defender Rafael Ramos and Winter for their time on the pitch.

Molino in action, notches assist

Kevin Molino’s return to full fitness continued on Wednesday.

The Trinidad and Tobago international was part of the team’s second team that was inserted into the field toward the latter end of the game. The 2014 United Soccer League MVP didn’t find the net, but assisted in the game-winning goal that was scored by Ribeiro in the 80th minute.

“He’s only had 10 to 15 minutes, but he looks OK,” Heath said. “We’re just hoping we can get more minutes between now and the beginning of the season because bottom line is he’s one of our best players.”

Molino is slowly coming back from an ACL tear that occurred last year during a friendly. The injury, which happened early in the MLS season, forced the midfielder to miss the entire 2015 season.

More Lions action

Orlando City B 1, Toronto FC 0

Buzz: Pierre da Silva’s goal in the sixth minute saw OCB (3-0 in preseason) defeat Toronto. 

2nd-half starting XI: Mark Ridgers; Zach Ellis-Hayden, Craig Nitti, Kyle Callan-McFadden, Tyler Turner; Raul Aguilera, Jonathan Mendoza, trialist, da Silva; Michael Cox, William Eyang

(via The Mane Land)

Follow Mike Gramajo on Twitter (@byMikeGramajo). For more, follow the OSJ on Twitter (@OSJSoccer).

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