BRIDGEVIEW, Ill. — Bakary Soumare has been known to act out of emotion.
Before he left the Chicago Fire in 2009, the defender was involved with a well-publicized locker-room spat with then head coach Denis Hamlett, and a few weeks ago, he was red-carded after a game for approaching a New England trainer after heated words were exchanged on the field.
Soumare admits his emotions got the better of him on Saturday night when he tweeted at Jeff Crandall, a writer for the Fire's official website, “You are pretty f* terrible at what you do” after Crandall pointed out that Soumare had a “pretty bad hand ball” in the first half of the Fire's 2-1 loss to Seattle that led to a Sounders penalty kick. Soumare deleted the tweet later that night.
“We're in a tough stretch for us, everyone knows in this club, the players, the teammates, everyone in this club knows everything I bring to the table and how passionate I am about my job,” Soumare told MLSsoccer.com after training on Monday. “I love what I do, and it was out of emotion. I was obviously pissed about the game. The way I am on the field shows you how much passion I have for the game.
"I really care about this club and this team, and sometimes I just get emotional. I am a human being and I make mistakes. You learn from it and you move on.”
Crandall said the pair sat down with Chicago head coach Frank Klopas on Monday morning for a few minutes and hashed out their differences.
“For me, it's nice when you have someone like Baky, who you can relate to in caring as much as you do about the club, and you can talk through it and put it in the past,” Crandall told MLSsoccer.com. “That's what [he, Frank and I] did today. To me, it's in the past. I don't take any offense to any of it.”
Crandall's tweet was more an assessment of a play than criticism of a player, but Soumare took offense.
Criticism or not, the veteran center back knows he needs to handle similar situations differently in the future.
“At the end of the day, stuff like that can happen in your career,” he said. “People are going to criticize you for things that you do, and you have to be able to take it.
"Jeff and I talked about it, I talked to my teammates about it and the club, and it's all good. I think people, in general, will always find ways to magnify things. As long as Jeff is moving on and I'm moving on, everything else is superficial.”
