Give Us Points!!!

By: Rocky Cole | July 24th, 2009

The promise of Real Salt Lake’s pre-season success in the Carolina Challenge Cup, and the team’s obvious strength at home, faded in early summer. RSL looked good early on, really good, and I was hopeful that the strong 2008 finish was heralding the birth of solid, top of the conference team, you know, a team that could always be counted on to get into the playoffs. Dare I say it, one of the big four, but then, road woes continued, and while RSL was strong in Rio Tinto, a road win was nearly impossible. Then, ties on the road and finally a win and I started thinking, “At last, it’s all coming together!” But think again, RSL started to (gasp) lose at Rio Tinto. Me, I’m scratching my head and asking, “What the hell happened?” The thing is, I have a feeling that Jason Kreis asked the same thing… repeatedly. I mean, he has a strong team, maybe one of the best with raw talent that has ever donned the cobalt and claret, but wins have been hard to come by, and you know what? Ties no longer cut it in MLS, not if you want to make the playoffs and stay at the top of the table.

Mid-summer, and things get even tougher. Especially when you have some of the key RSL players away on international duty. Johnson, Beckerman, and a couple other players out, and the team takes a loss or two while teams like Los Angeles and Colorado pull off wins, and suddenly RSL is third from the bottom and out of the playoff picture. As always, though, the end of the season is crunch time – time for redemption. After the all-star break things get dicey and teams make or break their season. Beckerman (still making us proud with the US MNT in the Gold Cup) is arguably playing the best football of his career but we won’t see him till after the all-star game. Now is the time for the rest of the team to carry the water and earn some points, and a home game against FC Dallas is an opportunity not to be wasted. Two wins in a row and RSL is right back in the playoff hunt, and seriously, while memories of last year’s playoff experience are great, I was kind of hoping to have an even better playoff memory created this year… one that did not involve watching multiple shots careen off the wood and see the lesser team go to the final (a team I might add, that represented the West while being from New York – give me a break!).

So crunch time is upon us and RSL’s players have some stepping up to do. Tonight they need to bring their A-game because FC Dallas, while languishing near the bottom of the table, is still a professional organization that would like to turn its season around. In other words, you cannot think that the game will be easy at all. I was in Stanford Stadium last Sunday and watched Mexico’s Club America hammer Inter-Milan. Inter didn’t see that one coming. My point, and I have one, is that RSL cannot take Dallas lightly. Come out hard, fast and strong and get the points. A tie won’t cut it at this point in the season.