Real Salt Lake by the Number (June 24th)

For RSL this Saturday’s matchup against Toronto will mark the midpoint of their season and the numbers don’t like a win would bring us to 20 points at the mid season point and would put RSL ahead of any of the previous 4 seasons. 20 points at the midseason mark is good it is halfway to the playoffs, 40 points was the magic number in 2007 and 39 was the number in 2008.

So with the midseason mark just a few days away, let’s look at a few things, first up the standings:

We are 12 points behind the top of the conference (and MLS) Houston, and 4 points behind Rocky Mountain Cup rival Colorado (with 2 games in hand). There are 4 matches for RSL before the All Star Match, the upside for RSL is that 3 of them are at home (TFC, San Jose, FC Dallas), so there are points to be had and if RSL is going to move up the standings they will need to beat the teams beneath them.

So let’s take a look at goals for and goals against comparison to past RSL seasons

So the 19 goals scored by RSL in their first 14 matches is the best in the team’s history, but not by much, and the 17 goals allowed again is a best for the team but again not by much. I think the thing that impresses me most about the 19 goals scored is that 11 players have scored for RSL, the most disappointing is that only 3 players (Robbie-6, Yura-3, Olave-2) have multiple goals.

So how does RSL stack up against the rest of the MLS in these stats?

RSL despite their 6-0 win over New England, and 4-1 win over Columbus rank only in the middle of the MLS when it comes to offensive power.

Only 4 teams have allowed fewer goals than MLS and each of them is in the West, and 3 of those teams have scored more goals than RSL (Houston, Seattle, and Colorado), one only has to imagine that if Nick Rimando had been healthy all year, if RSL could have played with 11 men in each match, that those defensive numbers might just be a little better.

All season long I have looked at the numbers and while I expected a better start, none of the numbers is greatly surprising as we are just one point behind last year’s total after 14 matches going into a stretch with 3 of 4 at home and if we can get 8 points out of those matches we will be a point ahead of last year’s total heading into the All Star Match, 10 points in those matches would have us equal to our total in week 21 of last season.

I am going to end with a look at our playoff chances, once again thanks to sportsclubstats.com

The draw against the best team in MLS didn’t give us as much of a boost as I would have hoped for and we are still under a 50% chance of making the playoffs, a win on Saturday would boost us up to almost 60% depending on other results.

Well there you have the numbers for this week, well almost all the numbers.

How about 2-0? Come on after a 3-1 loss to Italy, a 3-0 loss to Brazil, we all gave up hope and just wanted a decent showing against Egypt. Nobody was predicting a 3 goal outburst by the US, we had only scored one goal in the tourney and it was a PK. Then when Brazil did us a favor by beating Italy by that same margin, the deciding factor was the numbers, the goals for gave the US a 4-3 advantage over Italy and enough to make it to the quarterfinals. Then Spain, really, wasn’t it enough to have to face the number 4 (Italy), number 5 (Brazil), and number 40 (Egypt) teams in the world? Why couldn’t we get number 72 South Africa, nope we get to face the best team in the world, no losses in over a year more than 30 matches without a loss. I haven’t watched the match yet, but people couldn’t help telling me the score and beating the number one team in the world 2-0 is simply stunning and perhaps the biggest upset for US soccer in decades, well until we go to Mexico City in August and beat them 2-0.

OFF MY SOAPBOX

This entry was posted on June 24, 2009 at 10:25 pm and is filed under The soapbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.