Saturday afternoon Minnesota United dominated Los Angeles FC in a showdown between two of the top clubs in the Western Conference. So much was the domination that if you tuned in after half time and did not see the scoreboard you would have thought that it was Minnesota who won. Alas that was not to be the case as a single goal from LAFC's David Martinez in the ninth minute won the match for the visiting side.
“I think we did a really good job. Obviously we're chasing the game at the end, so Drake [Callender] had to come up with two or three major saves," said midfielder Wil Trapp. "But other than that, I didn't really feel like there was a moment other than the goal where we were really under sustained pressure where we were struggling to get out. So, that's again something that we can take a lot of positives from."
The stat sheet backs up the look that until a late LAFC flurry, it was Minnesota who controlled the match whistle to whistle. MNUFC took a whopping 23 shots, or roughly one every 3 minutes and 54 seconds on average and turned out an expected goals (xG) of 1.91. But of those 23 the Black and Gold blocked 10 of them, seven were off target, and only six made it on target. That contrasted Los Angeles' total of seven shots, all of which ended up on target, but only resulted in an xG of 0.8.
In the first five minutes of the match MNUFC looked like a completely different team to the one that had been seen all season. Gone was the defensive play that was the Loons soaking up pressure and breaking the other side on the counter. In was an offensive firestorm of constant pressure, chances, and shots towards goal. But the best chance of the half did not come during that flurry, but instead closer to the half hour mark from Jefferson Díaz. His shot came just centimeters from scoring as LA's Timothy Tillman blocking the shot quite literally on the goal line right before it could cross the line for a goal.
“I mean, you look at the number of chances we had and the amount of the ball we had, the amount of corners, set pieces, chances off set pieces we had, and it’s disappointing," MNUFC manager Cameron Knowles said following the loss. "You play, you do well enough where you feel like you should get something out of the game, and today just wasn’t our day for that.”
Díaz and Kelvin Yeboah had just as good of chances to score in the second half as Díaz did in the first half. The first started from through ball from James Rodríguez to Kelvin Yeboah in the 58th minute. Yeboah wasn't able to cleanly trap the ball, though still hammered a shot towards goal. Due to the timing and lack of quick and clean trap from Yeboah, Nkosi Tafari was able to run in and block the shot just wide of goal.
After a trio of substitutions Jefferson Díaz got another chance to score and level the match. Joaquín Pereyra, who had just come on the pitch, sent in a cross that Díaz easily managed to get to. But the header from the Colombian skipped just to the left of goalkeeper Hugo Lloris. While not the Loons final chance it was the club's last real chance at putting a goal in during the match.
“That’s what you want, you want to be generating chances, you want guys to get in good areas to score and maybe on another day one of those falls and hits the back of the net," said Cameron Knowles. "But, you’d be feeling a lot differently if we walked away from this and only created five chances and one shot on goal, but we had a number of chances in that game. We’ve created them a number of different ways, through the run of play, through set plays, and we’ve had a lot of the ball, we just fell short.”
Now it's on to the fourth round of the Lamar Hunt US Open Cup and another trip to California to face the San Jose Earthquakes. San Jose defeated USL Championship side Phoenix Rising in the third round to advance in the US Open Cup and are on a six match winning streak heading into Tuesday. The 'Quakes also smashed LAFC 4–1 just last weekend, giving Minnesota a lot to prove as they aim for their first trophy since the NASL era.
“Ultimately it’s five games to win the [Lamar Hunt U.S.] Open Cup and we are on game two of five. The objective shifts in the sense that this is a one-off game," Trapp said. "Win it and we get one step closer to a trophy. It’s obviously a good team [San Jose Earthquakes]. To go there and win is difficult, they just beat the team we lost to [LAFC] by a handful of goals, so it won’t be easy, but it’s also something that we are really excited about because at the end of that road is a trophy.”
