Wasatch Soccer Sentinel
I paid seven dollars and learned Danish to watch RSL lose this morning.
Well, that’s a little bit of a lie. I didn’t actually learn Danish. I kind of clicked around until I discovered a way to pay, then I followed the same process to find a way to stream it.
Anderson Julio opened the scoring for RSL with a crafty pluck off a center back’s poor pass in the 16th minute, intercepting the ball and firing home from 40 yards out. With Brondby’s goalkeeper well off his line, it was an easy affair for RSL’s striker.
Brondby leveled after RSL, for one reason or another, decided to play it out of the back with just Braian Ojeda and Erik Holt central. Holt played a middling pass to Ojeda, and he (quite naturally) wasn’t able to control the ball. Brondby’s Yuito Suzuki scored with a fine finish.
It’s funny, really. These first two goals came as a result of playing it out of the back poorly. Is this what we’re destined for in all but the very top leagues in the world? An attempted emulation of the possession strategies of the very best teams, marred by easily avoidable goals? Or is this just, you know, preseason?
Regardless, it felt pretty clear that Erik Holt, sporting a questionable beard, is layered with a significant and expected amount of rust. He played just 53 minutes in 2023 and was out through injury for huge swathes.
The second Brondby goal came in different fashion, with Nicolai Vallys firing from a relatively unprotected position in RSL’s box, with too much space between the center backs, the full backs and the midfield again costing RSL points or something like it. (This is a tournament, of sorts. They do sum points over the course of it. They don’t particularly matter.)
