Real Salt Lake v LA Galaxy – how many cards can we collect?

By Ambrosia Tonkovich @heyambrosia

Saturday, March 18: 1-2 Loss

Real Salt Lake had quite the day against LA Galaxy, with five yellow cards (three of which were given to RSL), a red card and a loss with the finishing score of 2-1, LA. This brings them their second losing game in a row (previously gave two goals to Chicago Fire last week), and a lot of things to work on next week while we have Nick Rimando out for USMNT call ups, Kyle Beckerman out for a red card during this game, and several players still out on injuries.

RSL came out looking strong in the first 20 minutes of play. Yura Movisyan had a beautiful header in the 18^th minute that brought the entire stadium to their feet for our first goal of the season. Kudos to Albert Rusnak for getting Yura set up with the ball so effortlessly. After a yellow card was handed out to both Luke Mulholland and Beckerman in the 34^th minute, and Beckerman handed a red card in the 44^th minute, RSL was down to 10 men heading into the ending of the first half.

The start of the second half proved to be a little rocky for RSL being a 10 man team. LA Galaxy caught up to us with an equalizer goal by Dave Romney in the 69^th minute, and surpassed us with a goal by Emmanuel Boateng in the 74^th, making that his 5^th MLS goal. Fun fact: all of his goals in MLS have been against RSL.

LA Galaxy did receive two yellow cards from Stoica, one in the 1^st minute of stoppage in the half to Romain Alessandrini and again in the 88^th minute to Nathan Smith. However, that was small potatoes compared to the impressive number of yellow cards handed out to RSL (In addition to Luke and Kyle, Rusnak and Chris Schuler also received yellow cards in the 61^st minute and 90^th minute, respectively).

All in all, a frustrating result for any RSL fan, even with a man down. The odds seemed a little stacked against us with cards flying everywhere, but we should’ve tried to pull it together for a home win.

Takeaways:

• Nick Rimando is ridiculously cat-like, in this video.
• We need to keep trying hard to get more goals. We are tied for bottom of the Western Conference right now. Hopefully we get some injured players back soon, as our team will be super scarce next week, but in the meantime, we need to keep fighting for more goals.