Ever wonder what a captain says to his team right before a huge game with bragging rights to a city at stake?
Ahead of Saturday’s Heineken Rivalry Week matchup pitting the New York Red Bulls against New York City FC at Yankee Stadium (3 pm ET, Fox), Dax McCarty hopped on the Men in Blazers podcast to give us a glimpse.
“It would have to be bleeped a lot,” the Red Bulls captain said. “But I’d say, ‘Boys, this is the moment we’ve all been waiting for.’ I’d kind look in their eyes, maybe grab a guy’s shirt and say, ‘Leave it all out there. We fight for each other, we kick their [butt] all over the field, we don’t worry about the ref, we don’t worry about the crowd, we don’t worry about anything. We go out there, we get three points, we walk off the field and say thank you very much.’ And that’s it.”
As for what it means to play NYCFC, McCarty did not try to hide the fact that the stakes will be raised, saying that before each of the three derby games last year -- all Red Bull victories -- he treated it “like the biggest games of the season” because he could feel the series “really take a grip on New York."
He even admitted that in games like these, you want to get in a “good, clean, fair tackle” early to set the tone.
“Whenever you beat NYCFC, it means a little bit more than a normal game,” McCarty said. “I’ll never forget the feeling after beating them at Yankee Stadium. There were thousands of our fans in the nosebleed section and you could see them going nuts. I kind of just wanted to say on the field for an hour after the game was over and take it in and enjoy the moment.”
The confident Red Bulls captain McCarty added that he had “no fear” NYCFC would steal his own team’s spotlight when they joined the league last year, adding: “If I could bottle that feeling up and sell it on the street, I’d probably get a couple hundred bucks for it.”
In a wide-ranging and funny interview, he also described what playing at Yankee Stadium is like, his reaction to being excluded from the US national team picture, why he grew up a Manchester United fan and, of course, Tommy McNamara’s “flowing hair.”
New York City FC head coach Patrick Vieira also jumped on the pod to discuss his own experiences playing in the Arsenal-Manchester United derby and what he plans to tell his players before his first New York rivalry game.
Take a listen to the whole thing above.
