There’s only a week left until Major League Soccer teams can start arriving to Orlando for the MLS is Back Tournament. And while COVID-19 cases in Orange County, Florida, are rising, Real Salt Lake is solely focused on playing games again after the season was suspended in March due to the pandemic.
“It’s no injuries, everyone feels good that now we can just be positive and looking forward to the tournament that will be in Orlando,” midfielder Damir Kreilach said this week.
RSL will play in a group with two rivals — Sporting Kansas City and the Colorado Rapids — and Minnesota United. A week after the league revealed the draw, the club began full team training.
But perhaps the most important element for RSL heading into the tournament is a bit of what Kreilach said: no injuries.
Back in the first two weeks of the 2020 season that now feel like a lifetime ago, RSL drew its first two games against Orlando City and the New York Red Bulls. In those two games, and for parts of the preseason, coach Freddy Juarez put some of his players in unnatural positions because his attackers — Giuseppe Rossi, Sam Johnson, Kreilach and others — were either nursing injuries or not fully fit yet.
But the season’s suspension actually allowed those injured players, who were slowly starting to get minutes, to regain full health. Now RSL can put its best boot forward when the tournament starts in Orlando on July 8.
RSL was placed in the top seed in Group D because of its record in the 2019 season, when the club finished third in the Western Conference. But in that group, RSL is the only team without a win. The other three are a combined 6-0-0, while Salt Lake has two draws.
The tournament format calls for the first three games to count toward the 2020 regular-season standings. So the team has set a goal for the amount of points it wants to earn.
“The mindset is going down there to get out of the group,” RSL assistant coach Tyrone Marshall said. “If we can get out of the group, that means we achieved what we wanted to achieve, which is to obtain maybe four to six points. That’s what we want to get coming out of that group because that group is going to be a really tough group.”
Marshall said the team has been predicted to finish last in the group.
“For us, we’re going in with the mindset that we have something to prove,” Marshall said.
RSL’s goal, aside from the points, is to emerge as champions of the tournament. But captain Kyle Beckerman said every team in the league is somewhat unsure of how they will play after a long layoff, which makes it difficult to have confidence right at the start.
A gutsy performance, however, might alleviate that.
“It’s going to take a lot of the suffering and the will to suffer and just coming together and doing, really, the dirty work and everybody putting in the work together to help win a game,” Beckerman said. “And I think then if you can kind of maybe not play your best but get a win, then the confidence will kind of come with that. And then hopefully you can use that confidence to turn it into momentum for the rest of the tournament.”
Follow @AlexVReporting