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SANDY — Real Salt Lake returns to its fortress inside Rio Tinto Stadium Wednesday night and to Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup play after more than a month — hosting Major League Soccer Western Conference opponent the Portland Timbers in a semifinal match.
The match is being called perhaps the biggest game of the year so far this season for RSL, and the Salt Lake club is treating it exactly like that as it continues its pursuit to this year’s U.S. Open Cup hardware.
“Excited for this one,” defender Nat Borchers told ESPN 700 Monday. “We’ve been looking forward to taking a bite out of these guys for a long time. They’ve had a great season. Will (Johnson) has moved over to Portland and done a fantastic job leading that team. They’ve gotten great results, so this is a huge, huge game for us. And I think it really sets the tone, not only just as an Open Cup game, but I think it sets the tone for the league. I think that in the league we’re going to have to do a lot of work to take care of these guys, and it’s going to be a really tough game.”
The Salt Lake club qualified for the semifinal match June 26 with a shutout 3-0 win over the Carolina RailHawks inside Rio Tinto, which gave RSL the hosting rights for this week's semifinal match.
RSL enters the match fresh off a 2-2 draw in MLS play against Colorado last Saturday, where the result lost the Salt Lake club the Rocky Mountain Cup for at least another year. The match is also the club’s first return to Rio Tinto in two and a half weeks.
Following the weekend match, the focus quickly turned to Wednesday almost immediately for RSL despite the first loss of the Rocky Mountain Cup in seven years.
“I think it's the most important game of the year so far,” RSL goalkeeper Nick Rimando told the media following the match. “Portland's a very good team, we're not taking them lightly at all. It's a huge game coming up, and I think everyone in this locker room knows it. Right away the talk in the locker room was to get prepared for Wednesday.”
Portland enters the midweek match off a draw this last weekend, 1-1 with MLS opponent the Vancouver Whitecaps.
Wednesday night will see the return of former RSL midfielder Will Johnson, who was traded to the Timbers on Dec. 3, 2012, in exchange for allocation money. Johnson played five seasons for the Salt Lake club, netting nine goals and tallying eight assists.
“It’s going to be a fight against Willy boy,” said Borchers. “He never backs down. You know, we would play games in training that singly wouldn’t mean anything and for Will they just meant everything — he always wanted to win, he was always up for the challenge — it’s going to be no different for a big game Wednesday night.”
A win Wednesday night would give the Salt Lake club the hosting rights to the U.S. Open Cup final, where the club would face the winner of the Chicago Fire and D.C. United semifinal match, which is also Wednesday.
The possibility of hosting the U.S. Open Cup final in its own stadium is something the Salt Lake club doesn’t want to think too much about but definitely is aware of going into Wednesday’s semifinal match.
“I think you definitely acknowledge that possibility and you definitely allow yourself to think about it, but only briefly because we’ve had some great opportunities in the past to really take advantage of these situations, and I don’t think we have with regards to playoff results and some big games we’ve had at Rio Tinto. So we owe it to ourselves, we owe it to the fans to win this game and get that game at Rio Tinto for the championship.”
The Salt Lake club will have to take care of business first Wednesday night in order for that to happen, but it is very aware of that.
“To be able to have a chance to hoist a trophy in your home stadium is a huge opportunity, and if we play right on Wednesday we have that chance to do that at home in the final,” said Rimando.
Following the midweek match, the Salt lake club will again have a short turnaround as it returns to MLS play Saturday hosting the Houston Dynamo. Kira Terry is a sports writer covering Real Salt Lake for KSL.com. Follow her on Twitter, @kiraterry.
