Carson, CA – Soccer emerged from the ancient history of sport as the ultimate team game. By eliminating hands and arms from any direct contact with the ball, a field player can only touch it. Soccer terminology describes dribbling as a touch to oneself, passing as a touch to another player, and shooting as a touch toward the goal. Coaches evaluate the quality of a player by the effectiveness of these three kinds of touches in game situations.
No one player on the Galaxy could match up with either of two world-class LAFC players, Denis Bouanga and forward Olivier Giroud. Bouanga proved it in the first fifteen minutes. Isolated against twenty-year-old Galaxy center-back Jalen Neal, Bouanga tied him up in knots with dribbling speed and touch, assisting fellow winger Mateusz Bogusz in the third minute and scoring himself in the fifteenth minute.
FC coach Steve Cherundolo employed the same simple strategy that won them the first two El Trafficos—clog the middle. Galaxy’s elite midfielder Riqui Puig wants to dribble from the left into the middle and try a killer pass. Top-scoring right winger Gabriel Pec will never cross the ball into the box. He will always cut from the right side to the middle. Neither one will pass to someone else if they see a chance to shoot. Footage of the first quarter hour reveals FC defending deep in their own half, with every player within the width of the penalty box.
Puig did exactly what Cherundolo expected him to do, starting from the middle, he forced a sixty-yard pass to Pec, easily cut out by FC left-back Omar Campos. According to the script, he cleared the ball into the middle of the Galaxy defense. Neal headed it toward midfielder Edwin Cerrillo. FC midfielder Lewis O’Brien pounced, outmuscling Cerrillo and spraying the ball to Bouanga on the left sideline, isolated against Neal.
The Galaxy’s newest signing, German legend Marco Reus, sprinted back to help, but Bouanga beat Neal to the end line before Reus could arrive. Yoshida’s tepid attempt to clear the shot bounced onto Bogusz’s head, 1-0 LAFC. Cherundolo sat calmly on the bench—everything proceeding exactly as planned.
Galaxy coach Greg Vanney rolled out an experimental setup with both Puig and Reus as hybrid midfielders with creative and facilitator responsibilities. “We got ourselves into a hole. I thought our setup wasn’t the right setup given the circumstances. We were kind of expecting one thing and saw a little bit of another.”
Like players who must play games to gain experience, teams also mature over a string of games. With two new designated players, a wholesale roster change to start the 2024 season, and the recent addition of Reus, the Galaxy continue to endure growing pains despite their perch atop the Western Conference. ”It’s a group that’s maturing. That’s the thing that we talked about all season. With the roster additions and the way we have built the team. Then it was just about maturing together as a group competitively and having big experiences.”
To exacerbate the challenge even more, Galaxy center-back Maya Yoshida could not contain the powerful World Cup-winning striker and French hero Olivier Giroud by himself. In the fourteenth minute, Yoshida played a bad pass to Cerrillo out of the back. Spanish midfielder Ilie Sanchez pinged the ball to Giroud, who narrowly missed the right post with his shot.
That would be the last time the Galaxy attempted to play out of the back against pressure. From then on, McCarthy kicked it long, usually to FC. Immersed in the biggest competitive experience of the year, the Galaxy needed to adjust their structure to regain the midfield, shrink the space for Bouanga, and limit service to Giroud against the overmatched Yoshida.
Mature teams can make adjustments on the fly during games. Vanney attempted to assist from the sidelines with mixed results. “So part of it was adjusting our shape, our positioning, understanding where the spaces were, where the overloads were going to be, and the movements. Even in the first half, we created chances. We didn’t finish them. There weren’t a ton of chances, and they weren’t amazing, but we created some chances even though we were down 2-0.” The Galaxy need more team experience for the players to make on-field adjustments without the coach.
Whether Galaxy adjustments evened out the match or LAFC activated cruise control, it remained 2-0 at halftime. Not once in 2024 had LAFC lost when leading at halftime. Experience dictated a measured approach to the second half. Defend resolutely, continue to clog the middle, and wait for the Galaxy to take chances as the second half wound down.
Vanney hinted at the climate in the Galaxy dressing room when asked what he said at halftime, “Okay, we can’t do anything about what has happened behind us. Here are the things I think we need to do. We need to raise our intensity and raise our intention. I’m not gonna say everything I said in there…”
When pressed, Vanney explained the halftime adjustments that changed the game. “We just put Gabe (Pec) out wider. He held his position wide a little bit longer versus being a little bit narrower. Miki (Yamane) didn’t get so high so early because on the first two goals, we got caught with Miki breaking out too fast to get involved in the attack. Then we turn over the ball, and he gets attacked in the space that he left. So we held him a little bit more.”
The Galaxy team that jogged onto the field in the second half bore little resemblance to the frustrated first-half outfit. Armed with sensible adjustments, the ball pinged around the park like a pinball machine, focus and intensity etched every Galaxy face. Freed from covering, Reus began to roam into positions closer to Piug. The ball flowed between them, two players with one mind.
For the first time, LAFC defenders struggled to cope as Galaxy players exchanged positions, creating spaces and overloads, particularly in wide areas. In the fifty-third minute, Reus ranged to the left sideline to combine with Puig. The overload drew the defense over. When Puig swung the ball through Cerrillo back to the right, Pec found himself one-on-one with Campos. Galaxy striker Dejan Jovelic slid over to provide Pec with an option before peeling back toward the center of the goalmouth.
With Reus occupying the left flank, left winger Fagundez made a diagonal run from the sideline across the penalty box. When Pec delivered the pass, Fagundez dummied it to the waiting Jovelic. With FC defender Eddie Segura wrong-footed, Jovelic cut the ball onto his right foot and drilled it into the top left side netting to halve the lead, 2-1 FC.
The gravity of Reus and Puig on the left side tilted the FC defense. As the Galaxy cycled it back to the right, FC did not adequately account for Fagundez, who flashed across the goal area without a marker. The dummy froze the whole defense long enough for Jovelic to score a top-class goal. With the ball moving and players exchanging from wide areas, FC defenders simply could not cover the kaleidoscope of spaces swirling around them.
“In the first half part of it for me was observing where Marco felt would be the best place for him to take space, just kind of observing what they were doing. Then, I tried to help them find the best spaces to punish the other team. At some point, you just let them do what they do. But you have to structure the team around that as well.”
Reus and Puig worked out what they do in their first competitive fifty minutes, and no one could tell it was their first game together. Filled with confidence and pent-up passion, the Galaxy swarmed the helpless FC defense, a cohesive whole for the first time all season.
In the fifty-fifth, Cerrillo collected a clearance and gave it to Puig, who rainbowed a perfect pass to Pec on the right. Reus, who had drifted across the field from the left side, underlapped behind the defense, creating a pocket of space behind him for Puig to run into. Puig touched the pass from Pec toward Reus, getting it back immediately. Edwin Cerrillo, the Galaxy defensive midfielder, pushed up into the space vacated by Puig. The entire FC defense stood flat-footed across the penalty area when Puig played the ball back to Cerrillo.
The least likely player in the building unleashed a swerving missile with the outside of his right foot from twenty-five yards out. Even the formidable Hugo Lloris at full stretch came nowhere close as it ripped into top left corner netting. Cerrillo looked as stunned as LAFC. “I didn’t really think about it, to be honest. And then I was just surprised it went in. And then I didn’t know what to do after that,” 2-2.
It’s the kind of goal teams score when they play as one. In those moments of complete unity, any player on the roster can score. The ball flew off his foot with all the frustration of a team trying to win a trophy while getting to know each other for the first time. The other ten players on the field and the squad players on the bench participated. A goal of collective passion that flows into every touch on every play, fleeting moments that define the beautiful game. The Galaxy looked LAFC in the eye and said, “Pick that out of the net. That was our twenty-three-year-old defensive midfielder.”
Those divine passages of play can only last for a short time. Despite the majesty of those two season-changing goals, the sequences spanned only four minutes. The Galaxy continued to dominate possession and control the game, unleashing wave after wave of attack. FC managed a few sequences of possession, but the Galaxy intensity and perhaps LAFC fatigue left them unable to mount any serious challenge.
In the sixty-sixth minute, Puig showed why he sticks exclusively to his right foot for anything meaningful. After winning the ball in midfield, Reus delivered the ball to Pec and sprinted past him to receive a pass on the end line. His pass back to the top of the box found Puig’s left foot. With no option to turn it back to his right, Puig attempted a shot that he might claim to be a pass directly at Jovelic stationed in front of goal. The Serbian striker deflected it past Lloris, 3-2 Galaxy.
When the Galaxy began to breathe normal air again, FC tried to mount a final response, winning a corner kick in the eighty-first minute. Six-foot-three-inch Kei Kamara had posterized Jalen Neal in a previous El Traffico, skying over him to thump a thunderous header past McCarthy. The Galaxy needed to defend this corner to secure the victory. This time, Neal bodied up Kamara, pushing him away from goal so Yoshida could clear. Working together, the two accomplished what Neal could not do alone.
The Galaxy kept control of the ball, daring FC to chase. Line-splitting passes developed into dangerous opportunities, but FC defended resolutely until the eighty-fifth minute when the Galaxy won a corner kick. Pec motioned for Reus to move closer and played a pass to him at the top of the box. Reus passed to Puig, who evaded a defender and passed it back.
The German star pressed the pause button, surveying the penalty box. Without looking, he fizzed a quick pass to Puig, perfectly weighted for a touch and strike. Standing wide open at the top of the box, the Spaniard curled a bullet around Kamara into the right edge of the goal. Completely unsighted, Lloris did not move, turning helplessly toward the ball in resignation, the perfect record after leading at halftime obliterated and their dominance over the Galaxy broken, 4-2 Galaxy.
For the first time all season, the Galaxy played like a cohesive unit back to front in the second half. The best low-block defense in the league could not cope as the Galaxy blitzed them with four unanswered goals. Vanney refrained from limiting Puig all year, believing “you just let them do what they do.” Instead, he kept working with the team to develop a structure and pattern of play that maximizes the qualities of the best players. With the addition of Rues, they found their cohesion in the biggest game of the season. They now sit in the poll position to host every game throughout the playoffs.
In a game and twenty-five minutes, Reus found his place in the team by aiming to support what Vanney had already developed. As Vanney put it, “He’s just tried to integrate himself with the players. He’s not trying to take over games, not trying to do anything like that. He’s trying to fit into the team. Then you see the rhythm that he’s able to play in. When he and Riqui were getting moving together, how soft the ball was kind of flowing between them, and how soft his feet are. In the second half, they freed up a little bit, and they were playing off what they saw. It was fun to watch.”
Reus proved to be the final piece against LAFC. Now, Vanney faces one more task. How will Joseph Paintsil fit into this mix? One can be sure Marco Reus will have something to do with it.
Read this, and all of Catamount’s articles at Catamount on Corner of the Galaxy