Team together: Utah Royals FC looks like it’s peaking at just the right time

Sandy • August seems to be the month where Utah Royals FC decides to turn it on.

Last season, with a playoff spot hanging in the balance, the Royals went 3-1-1 that month to catapult themselves into the fourth and final berth. And although they won their final game of 2018 — the only September game — results around the league eliminated them from the postseason.

Utah was in virtually same situation last month. Sitting in seventh after an abysmal July, the team needed to fix whatever was going wrong, and fix it immediately if it had any hope of reaching the playoffs in 2019. In August, the Royals did just that, going 3-1-1 again to earn the fourth spot in the National Women’s Soccer League standings.

But there are two major differences this year. First, the last three of those results had to come on the road, representing the longest road trip of the season for the Royals. Coach Laura Harvey said recently that getting two wins and a draw away from home set the team up well for the remainder of the season.

“If you’d have said to me before the Sky Blue game we’d take 10 points out of 12 in those [three road] games, I’d have taken them in any order really,” Harvey said. “We’re just really pleased that we were able to do that and get ourselves in a position where our destiny is in our own hands.”

After a tough loss to Chicago to start August off, the Royals produced wins against Sky Blue, Seattle and Orlando before drawing with Washington. They seemed to have solved the balancing of act of creating chances and defending.

Some players, however, think something else is happening that’s contributing to Utah’s surge.

“I think these last four games … we played more as a team and we played almost the full 90,” midfielder Lo’eau LaBonta said. “I think some other games, we would start off really hot and then wouldn’t be able to successful in the end and that’s where we lost.”

LaBonta said there were some losses that set the team back mentally and “fired everybody up.” One of those losses led to a meeting with Harvey and three of her most important attacking players to figure out how to create more opportunities. Since then, the Royals have been on a roll.

Midfielder Veronica Boquete said she didn’t feel like the team did anything different in the last four games, save for being more aggressive in its pressure and and having more quality in the final third. But she did acknowledge that the team’s mentality changed in the sense that it played like every game was the last of the season.

“Every game was a final and we fight for the three points like there is no tomorrow,” Boquete said. “And that is our plan for the rest of the season.”

The second different between the last two Augusts is that there are still six games left for the Royals to capitalize on the momentum gained from last month. Harvey made it clear that Utah has to at least be competitive in those games if it wants to keep its playoff spot.

“We can’t let the position we’ve put ourselves in slip away now,” Harvey said. “We’ll be devastated collectively if that happens because we know how hard we’ve worked to get to this point.”

When asked how close the Royals are to playing the way they want to play game after game, Harvey said they’re “nearly there.” Boquete and LaBonta agreed, both saying that at the moment, Utah is putting together performances that last close to the full 90 minutes.

The Royals aren’t there yet, and they know that. But Harvey thinks the last month showed what the team is made of.

“Sometimes when you get to a position where it’s do or die, you find out a lot about people,” Harvey said. “And I think what we found out about our group is that they’re willing to step up in those moments. And I think that if we could continue to do that in the next six games, we’ll be fine.”