S1: The RSL Story. Ep 5: Cinderella Crashes the Ball
When asked to describe how it felt to be part of the last-second goal that gave Real Salt Lake the last spot in the 2021 Major League Soccer playoffs, winger Justin Meram was light on a few details.
“Honestly, it’s like I almost blacked out,” Meram said. “I swear. Because after I did the bike (bicycle kick), it was almost like I saw the guys celebrating. That moment is one that sticks with you forever.”
It was a dramatic play – where with the 33-year-old’s bicycle kick that Damir Kreilach tapped past the goalie – seemed a fitting culmination to a season of chaos. The team with no owner, picked to finish last, abandoned by their head coach just 10 weeks earlier, and led by a coach, who almost left the sport a few years earlier, was on their way to the playoffs.
“We are a resilient group,” Meram said. “And I think this year has shown that we can go anywhere and compete… just with the attitude to never quit. I think you’ve seen that with us throughout the year. It worked out, and here we are.”
But the soccer gods weren’t done testing RSL’s ‘resilience’ just yet.
Two days before the team made the trip to Seattle – the club that lured their head coach away mid-season for an assistant coaching job – coach Pablo Mastroeni got even more bad news.
“I think I was in the coach’s room, and the trainers came in and said, ‘Albert tested positive for COVID’,” Mastroeni said, referencing Albert Rusnak, the team’s 27-year-old captain and second-leading scorer.
Mastroeni said the blow landed hard.
“That’s life…Fight on,” he said of his first thoughts. “I’m not wasting my energy on something I can’t control. We’ll figure it out.”
Fans and media wouldn’t know Rusnak wasn’t making the trip to the first-round showdown with the Sounders until about 90 minutes before game-time.
“Bad news today, guys,” Rusnak wrote in a social media post. “Unfortunately, I’ve tested positive for COVID. It’s hard to believe I’m not there with the boys in Seattle, but I know this group, everyone works and fights for each other. I have all the confidence in the world that we will get the job done. I’ll be back as soon as health permits.”
And that was it.
One more punch to the gut. How could this happen now? RSL needed every advantage to even have hope of a victory. It really felt like maybe, for this Cinderella, the clock was about to strike midnight for everyone but Mastroeni and his band of cleat-wearing believers.
“As a coach, you want to inspire and motivate and instill belief in the group,” Mastroeni said. “But we also know that Seattle, at that time, was obviously the best team in the league. They have fantastic players that plan artificial turf. I mean, there’s so many variables that go into why it’s so difficult to play against Seattle in Seattle. …You know, from their perspective, I feel like they thought they were just gonna run all over us.”
It felt as if – if it weren’t for their bad luck, they wouldn’t have any luck at all. But interim coach Pablo Mastroeni has a plan – and the universe was going to send him a little more luck. The result would galvanize a battered club in ways no one could have imagined.
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