The subject of this week’s trash talk piece was a toss up between Portland and Minnesota’s performance in the US Open Cup on Wednesday night. And then I realized United was playing Real Salt Lake on Saturday. That’s right: RSL is so forgettable that I literally forgot we get to play them again.
The perfect way to bounce back from that shellacking down in Kansas City is to play one of the only teams that regularly makes the Loons look like they could challenge the Fire for the World Cup. Don’t be mad about the Open Cup performance, either. All you needed to see was the starting XI to know they were favoring an attempt at making the MLS playoffs instead of a Cup run. Real Salt Lake also got knocked out of the tournament by a similar margin, but instead of losing to top-of-the-league MLS talent, they were downed by Don Garber’s personal ass-kissers in Sacramento Republic FC.
I’m all over the place on this one, so let’s redirect focus back to RSL and Salt Lake City, the birthplace of white people.
They somehow got the 2002 Winter Olympics despite the most famous person from SLC being Roseanne Barr. But the fact that she’s the top talent to come out of there kind of says it all. It’s a place where you can’t order a drink in a restaurant without first looking at the menu and a lot of places don’t even allow you to watch the drink being made. For some reason that just makes me too nervous to ever want to visit, like I’m going to be wrangled into some desert cult that shames people for drinking a beer.
Ask the average fan to name a player from the RSL roster that’s not Kyle Beckerman or Nick Rimando. They absolutely will not be able to. Maybe Brooks Lennon (somehow a homegrown player even though he’s from a place 10 hours away) if they’re a Liverpool fan. Loons fans get a pass on Matt Van Oekel as well. So they have two goalkeepers, a 19 year old, and a guy who looks like he’s about a season away from a dispensary apprenticeship in San Diego. It’s unbelievable that this team was regularly challenging for trophies less than a decade ago, but that says something for the parity in MLS I guess.
Minnesota’s defense should have an easy enough time of it this weekend. RSL won’t even be knocking at the door, and if they do, it will be to tell us about God’s love through Jesus Christ. Salt Lake’s citizens are so conservative about things like drinking and sexuality that to this day, no one in town knows where babies come from because they are afraid to talk about it. They are so afraid of sex that their soccer team refuses to score, lest some filthy verbal insinuation be made.
So if you see Real Salt Lake fans averting their eyes this weekend, it’s either because they can’t watch their beer getting poured or because they don’t want to watch when the Loons are putting up a raft of goals.
