Loyal overcome plenty of obstacles in triumph on the road in USL
For the San Diego Loyal soccer club, the recent trip to Utah posed two rare challenges — one that was unique and a bit spooky, another that was extraordinary.
Start with the unique task, one that no soccer team could’ve imagined 13 months ago when the Loyal were launched.
Simply, it boiled down to this: Do your best not to get infected while traveling amid a viral pandemic that, in this case, has been surging in various regions of the United States.
Wearing face masks and staying 6 feet apart on the commercial flights and at both Lindbergh Field and Salt Lake City’s airport improved the team’s chances, as did other measures taken, but it won’t be known until after diagnostic tests are done today if anyone in the 23-person group became infected with the novel coronavirus, which causes the COVID-19 disease.
“Hopefully, nobody has the virus — because you are definitely more exposed when you are in an airport or on an airplane,” said coach Landon Donovan, after returning to his wife and three young children in San Diego.
The second challenge was the soccer match itself, which posed this grinding exam across 90 minutes:
Could the Loyal’s players maintain the discipline needed to carry out Donovan’s plan — hog the ball, wear down the opponent — in conditions that were unusually taxing?
The answer was yes. “It was a really mature,
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professional performance by our team,” Donovan said Monday of the 1-0 victory Saturday over Real Monarchs SLC that kept the Loyal (2-0-1) unbeaten through three matches in the United Soccer League’s Championship division.
Donovan listed the rare circumstances that he accounted for while shaping his game plan. The team would be rusty in some aspects, having last played exactly four months earlier, soon before the USL suspended its season. Training camp for this “opener” was half of a typical preseason camp, so no player on either team would be in peak soccer condition. Scorching heat was in the weather forecast, in fact reaching 96 degrees. Playing at high altitude, in this case, about 4,200 feet above sea level, would be extra demanding, at least psychologically, and more so for the visiting team.
Donovan also weighed the opponent’s status as the defending USL champion in deciding that if his team was to win, it must shorten the game by controlling the ball. Not so easy.
“What happens in games is, you get tempted to go forward and try to score when you see space, right?” said Donovan, who was a goal-scoring forward in a 20-year career as a professional. “That’s human nature, and especially for attacking players. But, we had to consistently hammer home that we would win the game if we had more of the ball for longer stretches.”
He added: “Even if the game was boring and slow, we didn’t care.”
The coached singled out the team’s three defenders — Sal Zizzo, Grant Stoneman and Joe Greenspan — for poised work that maintained the desired tempo.
“They found themselves with the ball a lot,” he said, “and the temptation is to make a dangerous pass forward, and we asked them to just keep passing the ball among themselves until it was absolutely necessary or obvious to go forward.”
Donovan said Stoneman’s goal 17 minutes into the match, off what the coach graded as a “very good” corner kick by Jack Metcalf, stood as the winner largely because his team won the underlying game of ball control and energy conservation.
“They stayed really disciplined in just making the simple passes back and forth to wear out the Monarchs,” said the coach.
Good luck played a role, too.
A video replay showed that the ball took a timely odd hop for the Loyal near the team’s goalmouth, contributing to a Utah player’s failure to score near the back post.
That’s a goal, even with the odd bounce, eight or nine times out of 10 in a professional match.
tom.krasovic@sduniontribune.com