Wasatch Soccer Sentinel

Winning cures all ills, it’s sometimes said; goalscoring, I might argue, doubly so.

That’s the attitude I’m wrestling with today, because yeah — I get it.

Forster Ajago scored one goal he had to in Real Salt Lake’s miserable 2-1 loss to CS Herediano in CONCACAF Champions Cup play. He scored again against Seattle, and if MLS were only slightly weirder, he’d get the second assist on his own goal. (Did he? Let’s double check. No, he did not.) His goal was nice! Max Bretos on commentary declared quite loudly that maybe Real Salt Lake doesn’t need to sign a high-profile number 9 after all, which — well, we’ll get into it;

Beating Seattle Sounders at home feels good. There’s no mistaking that. There is something really nice about beating a team that’s hurt you in lots of ways on the road. I don’t know — this is one of those near-rivalries where the home team nearly always wins. That’s made for some very unexciting road trips to Seattle for me over the years, though it’s been some time since I’ve seen RSL at Lumen Field. (Lumen, Lumon — I don’t know, maybe there’s something there. Severance has been so incredible this season. Wow.)

Being this is that sort of historical match-up doesn’t change the dynamic of the result. The result, too, doesn’t change the dynamic of losing in CONCACAF Champions Cup at the first opportunity after being out of it for nine years.

I don’t know — I got a lot of that off my chest on Wednesday after RSL crashed out. I don’t know if it’s worth repeating all of it, though we’re absolutely going to be talking about it on the podcast soon enough if you want my unbridled thoughts on the matter. As a preview: I’m still mad about the triple substitution, I’m still mad Emeka Eneli came off, and I still can’t believe RSL came into the season without a battle-tested number nine.

Now, we’ve seen Ariath Piol, so we should consider that last one with a bit more evidence. Fortunately, I don’t think it’s controversial to say he wasn’t the figure of which we’re in desperate need. He’s not the striker of our dreams. And that’s fine. Nobody should expect a 20-year-old player with under 500 minutes of A-League experience to be The Guy, even if he scored a nice bicycle kick highlight reel goal. (I’m not yet convinced that he and Lachlan Brook weren’t highlight reel signings. Brook once scored five goals in a match against a semi-professional Australian side. Piol scored a neat bicycle kick. I dunno, you do the math.)

Equally, nobody should expect Forster Ajago, who has under 500 minutes of MLS experience and did almost all of that for a Nashville SC during a tremendously poor run, to be The Guy. Heaping those expectations on him is unwise. Yeah, his goal was nice. I’ll admit that quite readily. But do I think he’s the answer? Absolutely not. Players very, very rarely end up scoring even 10 goals in a season, especially out of the college system. Brian White, Jordan Morris, Patrick Agyemang and Duncan McGuire are the only four players out of 49 to have scored 10 or more in a season. All of those were drafted in the first round of the MLS SuperDraft; Ajago wasn’t selected at all. Do I think that means Ajago can’t do it? Of course not. He clearly has some great qualities, and he scored loads of goals in college. But him doing that in MLS would represent an incredible turn of fortune, both for Real Salt Lake and the player. While it would be a boon if it happened, it would still represent poor planning on RSL’s part, because you simply cannot plan for players to have extraordinary breakout seasons.

I do believe players should be given opportunities. Take Emeka Eneli, who has rapidly become one of RSL’s best players. He benefited from an unexpected long-term injury to Pablo Ruiz and even a short-term injury to Andrew Brody. He played at right back for an extended period in 2023. He took the most of his opportunities, but they were opportunities that came because the club had other plans that just didn’t go according to plan, for one reason or another. (We don’t need to re-litigate those reasons, obviously.)

If Forster Ajago or Ariath Piol end up as great MLS strikers, great. I’d love that. But I’d love that to happen because they took an opportunity — rotational minutes, occasional starts, great bench performances. I’d like to see them fight for a second spot on the team, not the first. As things stand, they’re fighting for the starting spot at striker. There is no good, natural goalscorer on this team. The closest is Diego Luna, whose eight goals and eight assists last year are in rare territory for any player on this team in their professional histories. We have Lachlan Brook, who scored nine goals in the 2023–24 season for Western Sydney Wanderers; Dominik Marczuk, who scored six in the ’23–24 season for Jagiellonia Bialystok; and Diogo Goncalves, who scored eight for SL Benfica B in 2016–17.

That’s the thing, I guess. If we had any proven goalscorers on this team — not just players who have had a good goalscoring season considering their position — I might feel differently. We do not. Diego Luna cannot do it alone, and I might argue that he suffers more than nearly anyone from not having a center forward with whom to engage.

Of course, we’ve talked about this. Just a week ago, I wrote about this very topic. The only thing of substance that has changed is that Forster Ajago has scored two goals. Maybe this is just a long-winded response to Max Bretos, who, like I said, loudly declared that RSL can end their search for a number nine. It’s not true, and I don’t want you to fall into the trap of seeing a short-term result and mistaking it for a long-term one.

After all — if Real Salt Lake is going to raise prices to fan-unfriendly levels on parking and concessions (hello, Ryan Smith — are you paying attention?), then they need to do something for the fans, and that absolutely should be a quality product on the field. I’m tired of this accepting of mediocre results, and make no mistake: Round-one exits in the playoffs aren’t even to the level of mediocre. After three seasons of that, it’s time to demand more.

I don’t know, though. If you look at the age of this squad, consider that Diego Luna is a near-lock to be sold this summer, and have anything but the rosiest of attitudes, it feels like this is a season when Real Salt Lake could struggle. I’d like them to not. I’m just worried, you know? I’m allowed to worry. So are you. Not that you have to, you know, but still. Something to consider.

It’s a long season. I’m here for it. I think Real Salt Lake needs to improve, and I don’t think the Seattle game showed the team thriving. If we’re going the classic Pablo Mastroeni “goals change games” route, we can look firmly at Nouhou and his own goal that opened the scoring for RSL on Saturday.

And before we get too far removed from it: There’s no reason Real Salt Lake should have lost on Wednesday. I mean, there are reasons — the performance wasn’t good enough. Pablo Mastroeni’s post-match press conference basically refused to acknowledge his role in that match, which is absolutely wild, considering the way it all went down.

That’s what we’ll end on today. Pablo Mastroeni, after Real Salt Lake crashed out at the first opportunity of Champions Cup, blamed the players publicly. He didn’t blame individuals, so I guess you could say he blamed the team. I don’t know. That triple-substitution, taking out Emeka Eneli — and for what? an early season MLS match? — it put the team in the worst possible position.

There’s that oft-trotted-out saying about great managers. To paraphrase: A great manager will praise their team when things go well, and they’re take the blame when things go poorly. Mastroeni’s press conference — well, let’s just put a couple of quotes out here.

If you don’t want to feel like shit on Saturday, then be better on Tuesday.

I look at the score sheet, and we had 30 shots on goal. We had 18 shots inside the box. I don’t know how you come away with one goal in that game. You’ve got to be killers, man. You’ve got to get numbers inside the box. You’ve got to be clinical. That game should have been put away in the first half, even the second half. We had balls rolling across the front of the goal. It’s a bit frustrating. … I thought we played a really good game. The way it works in football is, if you don’t score the goals you should, the pressure on the back line starts mounting. It takes one poor decision with the ball close to your goal to kill you. But again, I think there’s a lot of good stuff, but it’s just marred with the result. This game’s about winning.

I go back to Tuesday. Are you on time? Are you disciplined? Because every moment in a football match is important, and tonight, in one moment, it cost us the game.

I don’t know. I just can’t.

Yes, Mastroeni’s right. Poor decisions can cost teams the match. I don’t know who exactly he’s blaming for a poor decision — Diego Luna or Nelson Palacio. Or maybe he’s blaming the team. And yes, one of the causes of that awful result is down to that moment, when Luna passes to Palacio, who doesn’t react to the pass at all despite being fully within range of doing something with it. But when you concede a goal so incredibly quickly after changing out three players? I don’t know, Pablo. Maybe you should look in the mirror here.

And finally: 30 shots is a lot. But only six of those shots were on target. Two big chances were missed. 10 shots were blocked. Pablo does have a point: You’ve got to score your big chances. RSL simply didn’t. And sure, you could blame Forster Ajago, who missed one of those big chances. In a sense, you’re right to. He didn’t score when he “should have.” But it’s like I said above: Which players should have the weight of expectation? Which players have demonstrated repeatedly that they can score goals? Who deserves blame for Forster Ajago not scoring two goals — Ajago himself, or the team that put him in that position? And certainly, that team extends far beyond Pablo Mastroeni.