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MOOR THAN WILLING

The veteran Moor is itching to get back into the fray full-time after his long absence from the field and his teammates.

“I feel as fresh as I have in a long time. That’s exciting to me, especially with such important matches coming up,” Moor said on Friday.

“It’s a derby, it’s against our hated rivals, we know how important it is to the players, the club, the fans, the entire organization and we’ll play it like it’s a cup final. It’s a good opportunity to get ourselves going. I can’t think of a better way. The guys were buzzing this week and we’re locked in and ready to go.” Vanney, a long-time defender himself, is eager to have Moor back directing traffic.

“What he does is huge, he’s the one who plays most outside of himself, which is communicating to the guys next to him, communicating, reading the play, keeping things organized around,” Vanney said.

“It’s not necessarily what you see with (Mavinga), which is an incredible capacity to make plays and track people down and all that, Drew is the antithesis of that in terms of everything is dealt with before it happens. Even on the training field, there are few voices as loud as Drew. You add that to Michael (Bradley) and a few other guys and now you really have an atmosphere where things are being dealt with before they happen.”

SHORING THINGS UP

Better communication should be big for the club since Vanney feels some of the dropped points in recent weeks especially are about mental lapses, not a lack of quality.

“It’s not like we’ve played terrible through this stretch,” Vanney said.

“We’ve lost one game over our last eight or nine (in all competitions), so I think we’ve played decent soccer, the key to this is execution and it’s execution in front of the goal, around the goal when we get chances and it’s execution defensively. Concentration and attention to detail in every action to make sure we are executing to see games out.”

“We talk about some of the things we should be more attentive to, I think some of it is concentration and more professional decisions in the moment.”