Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
SANDY — The Seattle Sounders ended Real Salt Lake’s playoff stint Thursday night inside Rio Tinto Stadium by winning the second leg of the Western Conference semifinal series 1-0 off a goal scored in the 81st minute by Mario Martinez.
The Claret and Cobalt ends its season scoreless in its last five matches over all competitions.
“I think we have to score goals to win games,” said RSL head coach Jason Kreis of the result. “And you’ve got to win to advance.”
Despite the result Thursday night, Kreis couldn’t have had better words to say about his roster for the 2012 season.
“Our guys worked so hard for it really the whole year for me,” said Kreis. “I’m extremely proud of this group, extremely proud of the effort they put forth tonight.
“A lot of good things came out of this year with numbers of wins and numbers of points and we broke some records for our club, so there are definitely some positive things that we should remember.”
With two club records this year — 17 wins and 57 points — Kreis’ roster agreed with its boss on the positives that the club can take away from this season.
“We had a lot of fun times,” said RSL captain and midfielder Kyle Beckerman. “At the end of the season there’s only going to be one team that’s really happy, but we had a lot of positives this year. We would obviously like to finish it better, but we came up short.”
RSL goalkeeper Nick Rimando also remained positive and reflected on what the Salt Lake club was able to take away from its record-breaking 2012 season.
“At the end of the day I think we really have to look at our performance this whole season,” said Rimando. “We had a lot of wins and points — made a record in points and made a record in wins. We played some good soccer at times, even when we played bad, we were getting results. A lot of injuries and call-ups and we were still able to come and do well in the West and get to the playoffs and I’m happy with these guys. I’m happy with this team and there is something special here.”
RSL playmaker Javier Morales was almost speechless following the match saying, “We expected to advance. Everybody was excited to play at home in the final and now we’re just thinking about tonight.”
RSL ended its 2012 playoff stint 0-1-1 and its 2012 regular season 17-11-6 with 57 points.
“We’ll be back,” said Beckerman. “We’ll be strong next year. We’ll regroup in a couple days and get in the offseason, get some plans about trying to get better and come back next year.”
Kira Terry is a sports writer covering Real Salt Lake for KSL.com. Follow her on Twitter, @kiraterry.
