Another game, another shutout by LAFC in win over Columbus
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When defender Christie Pearce was roaming the backline for the women’s national soccer team, she lived by a simple adage.
“If we score, we might win,” she said. “If they never score, we can’t lose.”
For the most part that worked, with the U.S. losing just 20 times in the 311 games Pearce played in, more than half of them ending in clean sheets.
Pearce’s philosophy is now one LAFC appears to have adopted. In four of the five matches the team has played this season, goalkeeper Hugo Lloris hasn’t conceded a goal. LAFC has won all four.
The latest win came Tuesday, with Denis Bouanga scoring twice in a dominant and decisive 3-0 victory over the Columbus Crew in the first leg of a round of 16 CONCACAF Champions Cup playoff at BMO Stadium. The second and deciding leg will be played March 11 in Columbus with the winner advancing on aggregate goals.
Tuesday’s victory, in LAFC’s most complete performance of the season, was the first in four games with Columbus since Wilfried Nancy took over the Crew three years ago. Two of those losses came in finals, the 2023 MLS Cup final and last summer’s Leagues Cup final.
Although LAFC has been solid on both sides of the ball in its short history, it has primarily won with offense, producing three MLS scoring champions in its first six seasons. It has never scored fewer than 53 goals over a full season.
Mark Delgado scored the lone goal in LAFC’s win over Colorado in the deciding second leg of a first-round CONCACAF Champions Cup matchup.
But after a winter in which the team lost three of last season’s four leading scorers, replacing them with three defenders and a holding midfielder, LAFC coach Steve Cherundolo has asked his club to play defense first. And it has worked. Not only is LAFC giving up few goals, it’s giving up few shots, with Lloris needing to make just six saves combined in his four shutout wins.
Asked what’s changed since last season, Cherundolo smiled.
“I’ve gotten more gray hair,” he said before turning serious. “I haven’t changed, it’s the players. It’s their effort. This is one of the hardest-working teams in the league, and you have to outrun them if you want to beat them. And we did that.
“So it’s effort and then following the rules. The guys were very disciplined — technically quite disciplined — over 90 minutes. That’s a potent combination. If you have hard-working players, players who understand the do’s and do nots of defending and our principals at LAFC, you’re going to have a team that’s hard to beat. Certainly not conceding many shots on goal is a plus. I have nothing against continuing down that path. But at some point it won’t be that way.”
Columbus put just one shot on goal Tuesday, with the clean sheet giving Lloris 17 in all competition since coming to LAFC last season. It also ran his scoreless streak to 370 minutes. Lloris tied the MLS record with a five-game scoreless streak last season.
But if LAFC has conceded few goals, it has also scored few of its own, with its first three wins all coming by 1-0 scorelines, matching the number of 1-0 wins from all of last season.
“It’s one of the things that we were highlighting this offseason and for sure this preseason. We want to get back to being a club that does not let goals in,” defender Ryan Hollingshead said. “Going back to the identity this year of our backline being solid, keeping clean sheets. And you can see it the beginning of this season. If we have to win games 1-0 we have to be ready to do that. And we have. We’ve proven we can. That needs to be part of the DNA of this team, not relying on three, four goals a game.”
Hollingshead credited Cherundolo, a World Cup defender in his playing days, for the change in emphasis.
“You can see his defensive discipline come into play,” he said. “He just has such an eye for defensive shape, for the way we play as a back four, a back five. It’s impossible for him not to be micromanaging things in the right way to keep these clean sheets.
“We know that we have the goal-scoring ability of LAFC. And if we can now add this kind of defensive strength and consistency in not letting goals in, then we can match those two together. So maybe the pendulum swung a little bit to the clean-sheet side. At some point it will level back out and the goals will start coming.”
The goals started coming Tuesday with Bouanga giving LAFC the lone goal it would need in the 20th minute, taking the ball off the foot of indecisive defender Andres Herrera deep in the Columbus end, then beating Crew keeper Patrick Schulte one on one from the center of the box for his first goal of the year.
It was also the first goal LAFC has scored in the first half this season.
Bouanga doubled the advantage 40 seconds into the second half, curling a right-footed shot from the left edge of the penalty area into the side netting at the far post.
Bouanga was LAFC’s scoring champion in each of the past two seasons, although he got off to a similarly slow start last year, failing to score in his first four games before breaking the drought with a brace, just as he did Tuesday.
“It was great to see Denis enjoy his football again. When he does that, then things click,” Cherundolo said. “Tonight he put a complete performance in.”
Substitute Nathan Ordaz closed out the scoring in the 81st minute, with the three goals matching LAFC’s total from the previous three wins combined. That also left Columbus with a massive hill to climb in the aggregate score in next week’s rematch.
If LAFC holds on to its lead, it would probably face Lionel Messi and Inter Miami in the two-leg tournament quarterfinals next month.
