July 12, 2009 by f4denz.

Well despite the lighting screwing with some of my pictures I have a few you might enjoy. There are more and higher quality copies available at connect.roguecavaliers.com

Getting Ready

Club America fans getting ready-there would be more to this as the match progressed.

Clint wore number 77 to show support for Andy and Marcia (she was moved to the ICU in Seattle)

Neither side treated this like a pointless match, it was intense to say the least

Yura takes a shot

I have always found the faces players make when taking shots to be too funny, here is a great example

I will not be questioning his focus after this match

Clint powers a shot but it hits the wall

Can you tell this was taken through the net?

It may have seemed like we were the away team, but we had some great fans there last night

This guy, I am not too sure about

These fans seem OK

Fabi was working hard all over the pitch

Javi was masterful last night and here is he is setting up his shot that would be the only goal of the night

A big time celebration

Some RSL fans celebrate, now that they were finally able to get to their seats. It seems a very large group of Club America fans simply sat/stood where they wanted and not where their seats were, it took about 50 minutes to get it all worked out and there were some rather upset people on both sides of the issue

Robbie F. showing his hops and doing some defensive work

Until the match got a bit too physical the plan seems like it was to let Nick get some time in the midfield, don’t laugh he is a hell of a good player. Check out his high school stats if you don’t believe me

Like I said there were some unhappy people

I really did like how Fabi played during his 45 minutes, I hope he can save some for FC Dallas on the 24th

Tino goes for the bicycle-part 1

He makes contact but it went wide but was still entertaining

Scrum number 1

Scrum number 2

Last week this was a red card, last night not even a call

Taking down banners and signs has to suck when your team loses

And they did lose

Earlier in the year I made fun of some Seattle fans for doing this, but notice he is holding a loyalist scarf.

LBR again brought their A game, impressive

So we are going to play a little game of notice the difference between these next two pictures:

Picture A

Picture B

You know I am just kidding Trey, but someone else pointed it out to me and I laughed so I had to share it.

OK, that is enough for today. Use the link up top if you want to see some more pictures. This week it is back to matches that count in the standings as we have to head to Ohio to face the defending Champs and after we bloodied their noses at Rio Tinto early in the season you know the bananas will be looking for some revenge.

OFF MY SOAPBOX

Posted in The soapbox | 3 Comments »

July 12, 2009 by f4denz.

Well I heard a lot of fans complaining about this match and how RSL would just play their reserves (I am totally confused by this when RSL has only 17 players dressed for a match and 3 are keepers), and that the match didn’t count for anything, and how this would be a road match at home, and on and on complaining about everything they could think of, which seems to be a general trait for a lot of RSL fans this year. You know the ones who in May wanted us to dump Yura Movsisyan because he hadn’t done anything lately, but now after he gets back into form they all start to love him again, then he accepts an offer to play next year in Europe and now they question his heart and commitment to the team. The same ones who claimed that the second coming of Fabi would change everything, and now are starting to turn on him because he hasn’t scored a ton of goals.

Well a lot of questions were answered in my opinion, questions I really didn’t have much concerns about going into this match. First was it a road match at home? Not sure there were a lot of Club America fans in the stands and a lot of people I normally see in their season ticket seats were not there. Here is a hint if RSL fans don’t show up then of course there are lots of seats available for fans of a huge international team, but if the full complement of RSL fans (16,000 plus average home attendance) had shown up then no way would have it seemed like a road match. As it was there great pockets of fans of both teams in the stadium and it made for a great atmosphere with few problems. I would have loved to see more RSL fans and with just over 17,000 total fans at the match, there were plenty of open seats.

The next question about it being a reserve match, don’t know much about Club America and their starters but I have been told by several people that they played a lot of their starters and they only made 4 subs in the match. For RSL the only person in the lineup who isn’t a normal starter lately was Chris Seitz in goal and with Andy Williams rushing to Seattle to be with his wife who has been moved to the ICU unit, and Ian Joy in street clothes as he gets ready to return to Europe, we had only 17 players in the lineup. RSL made 4 changes as well with just one at the half as Fabi came in for Clint Mathis (I love the show of support that Clint made for Andy by wearing his number) and the other changes all came after the 60th minute with Horst, Nunez coming on in the 63rd and Raphael Cox coming on in the 72nd minute.

As far as it being a meaningless match, yes it was there were no points to be earned and only a trophy named for our jersey sponsor as a prize, but if you saw the match you didn’t see teams going through the motions as both teams not only played hard, but battled to win the match. For those who questioned Yura’s heart and if he would play hard for RSL knowing he was heading to Denmark in the winter transfer window, well in a match that had no points at stake Yura battled for each of the 72 minutes he was on the pitch and was quick to defend his teammate from the bench when the officials missed a bad foul. He actually was red carded from the bench for abusive language, something the officials deserved but Yura should have known better, but not the actions of someone who was “checked out” for the rest of the season.

I since the announcement of his signing a contract thought that if he stayed that he would perform like a professional, and tonight he did. In the post match press conference I asked head coach Jason Kreis about it and here is what he had to say in response(the question and answer are about halfway in the clip:

I thought it was a match played with a lot of energy from start to finish and both sides showed well, I admit I was worried a bit that this would be one of those matches where players didn’t work hard and just wanted to put in their time and get on with their weekend, but I now find myself wishing that we had full TV coverage of the match because I would love to watch it again without having to take pictures.

Here are the official stats from the match:

XanGo Cup 2009: Real Salt Lake v. Club América
July 11, 2009 — Rio Tinto Stadium

Scoring Summary:RSL – Javier Morales (unassisted) 54Club América – Armando Navarrete; Oscar Rojas, Armando Sanchez (Joaquin Martinez 57), Andres Rodriguez (Guillermo Cerda 61), Ricardo Rojas; Pavel Pardo, Salvador Cabanas, Lampros Kontogiannis; Jean Beausejour, Andres Chitiva (Enrique Esqueda 45), Angel Reyna (Arnhol Rivas 85)

Real Salt Lake – Chris Seitz; Chris Wingert, Nat Borchers, Jamison Olave (David Horst 63), Tony Beltran; Robbie Russell, Ned Grabavoy, Javier Morales; Robbie Findley (Tino Nuñez 63), Yura Movsisyan (Raphael Cox 72), Clint Mathis (Fabian Espíndola 45).

Substitutes Not Used: David Horst, Ian Joy, Tino Nunez, Chris Seitz

Pictures coming

I got a lot of good pictures tonight but since I shot in RAW it will take me some time to convert them into formats that can be used online and then sorted and put online. I hope to have that done tomorrow afternoon.

Posted in The soapbox | 6 Comments »