Real Salt Lake will attempt to bounce back from a disastrous home defeat at the hands of Columbus Crew, as the club makes their first visit to Livestrong Sporting Park to take on Sporting Kansas City tonight. Sporting Kansas City comes into this match with a club-record 13 game unbeaten streak. Debuts in new stadiums have not gone well for Real Salt Lake during its first seven seasons of play, as RSL’s overall record stands at 1-15-5 heading into Wednesday’s match.
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RSL must get out to a better start and it begins on the defensive side. Columbus managed to execute their game plan effectively and produced two early goals that Real Salt Lake could not recover from.
“We were prepared, but I think they came out with a game plan and caught us napping a couple times,” midfielder Andy Williams said. “They kind of took over the game and kept creating chances after chances. We adjusted after that, but couldn’t come through.”
Sporting is playing well of late and their record speaks for itself. The club sits tied for fourth place in the Eastern Conference. Livestrong Sporting Park has served the club well thus far, Sporting are still unbeaten in league play in their new home, with a 3-0-4 mark in league play.
“We continue to climb the ladder. Philadelphia lost last [weekend], and now we get another point,” said SKC manager Peter Vermes. “If you look back where we were and where we are, it’s a big difference. We’re in the hunt right now. We’re going to keep going after it.”
Offensively, RSL must produce a better display and execute in the final third. The club could not break Columbus down and as a result were held scoreless at Rio Tinto Stadium.
“To me it just came down to mental lapses. You’re down two goals to a team that’s very good defensively and works hard together and, I think, was going to come in to this game and try and put a lot of numbers behind the ball,” RSL manager Jason Kreis said. “It’s difficult to break them down.”
Real Salt Lake is glad to have Alvaro Saborio back from suspension. Saborio had scored four goals over the previous four matches he participated in. His offensive production can be the difference for RSL.
“A good way to look at it is we’ve got a lot of games left,” said RSL goalkeeper Nick Rimando in the post-game interview. “This is a game (Columbus) we obviously wanted to win because it was a home game, but again like Kyle (Beckerman) said, it’s a long season, we’ve got a lot of games left and the good thing is we’ve got a quick turnaround. We have KC this week, so we have no real time to mope about this game. We can look back and fix what we thought was wrong, but we can’t mope about it, we’ve got to keep our head high, look towards Kansas City and try to get a result there.”
Real Salt Lake will indeed go after a positive result in a hostile environment.
(image courtesy of realsaltlake.com)
