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SANDY — Real Salt Lake looked fatigued playing in its final game at Rio Tinto Stadium before the 2014 World Cup, which will see Major League Soccer take a three-week break during the group stages.
But can anyone blame them?
RSL’s players were facing their third game in three time zones in eight days, and the more-relaxed Portland Timbers used that to their advantage in beating the Claret and Cobalt 3-1 on Saturday night.
“It was a difficult game, a difficult week,” midfielder Ned Grabavoy said after the match. “You look at some of the games at the beginning of the season, we were getting a lot of breaks. Now, we had a few bounces not go our way.
“But even then, we’ve got to keep the effort going. That’s the stuff I look at. Nobody quit out there, and I think that’s important to look at right now.”
Never quit. Kept fighting. Perseverance. But even that wasn’t the story of the game, according to head coach Jeff Cassar. RSL was suspectible to Portland's counter attack, and a few choices played another way could have changed the game, the coach said.
"You're going to get caught forward when you're in an attacking style of play, but it's about the choices you make," Cassar said. "The kind of ball you can't play and you're realizing that if you do turn the ball over, it's going the other way. That's why you don't jam the ball down the middle. You have to go wide, because [if you don't] you're just sending them off to the races. They capitalized on two errors that we made."
Those two errors led to two goals by striker Fanendo Adi, whose first-half brace gave the visitors a 2-1 lead at halftime.
But Adi wasn’t the story of the match, either, as RSL (6-2-7, 25 points) held him without a shot in the second half. The large center forward finished with four shots — three of them on goal — and two goals, all of them in the opening 45 minutes. The Timbers (4-4-7, 19 points) made fewer mistakes than RSL and punished each Salt Lake flub mercilessly.
Tony Beltran saw yellow twice in less than a minute, earning two cards for persistent infringement and was sent off in the 53rd minute, sending the home team down to 10 men early.
Chris Schuler tried to defend a ball played into the box, but slipped and was called for a handball in the 72nd minute. Will Johnson converted that penalty kick to put Portland up 3-1.
But no matter where the blame gets placed, now it’s time for a break.
“I think it’s obviously helpful to have the Open Cup. We can shift focus to that now,” Grabavoy said. “There are still some games, and we can still be sharp in training, but we’ll take a little bit of a break mentally as well from this week. We’ll have a short break at some point. This was a tough week, for sure, but we need to work really hard.”
RSL will hit the road to play the North American Soccer League’s Atlanta Silverbacks on Saturday in U.S. Open Cup play. The winner will face the winner of Colorado and Orlando City on June 28 — all before the end of the World Cup’s Group Stage.
“We always want to get back to winning ways as quickly as possible,” Cassar said. “Traveling to Atlanta, playing on turf and in the heat, we’re going to have to play a very good game to get a win down there.”
The pseudo-break will come at a good time for RSL, who has turned a 12- match unbeaten streak into a three-match winless run. It will be a time to refresh, recharge and continue to prepare for match day with as many as two Open Cup outings.
It's just what the doctor ordered, especially for a team that still sits in second place in the league, seven points behind Seattle and three points clear of third-place Colorado.
“You don’t want to go in with that taste in your mouth,” defender Chris Wingert said. “Any time you lose a game, you want to get right back out there and get a win. But it is what it is, and maybe we need a little bit of a break here. We’ll re-focus, get back after it and hopefully we can play well in Atlanta and do well there.”
