SANDY — The first step to getting out of last place for the Utah Royals was to stop letting in so many goals.
The Royals came into Friday’s match against Angel City at America First Field with an NWSL-high 31 goals against, and left with their first clean sheet since April in a 0-0 draw.
“We really put the emphasis on the defensive part for the whole month of July,” head coach Jimmy Coenraets said. “I think that’s what you see, as well. Everyone that wants to drop a ball into our half of the pitch, they only get two to three seconds, which makes the defense slightly easier.”
The last time Utah held an opponent to no goals was the team’s lone win this season, a 1-0 victory over Chicago on April 18. That brings up the natural next step: scoring goals to get the team’s second win of the year.
The Royals are tied with Chicago for the fewest goals scored in the NWSL this season with 12, and have now gone two games in a row without scoring. The team has scored multiple goals on just three occasions this year, ending in two 3-2 losses and a 3-3 draw on the road in Washington, D.C.
The good news? Utah got its leading goalscorer from 2024, Cloe Lacasse, back from a torn ACL last week, and she was able to up her minutes from 24 to 31 this week, perhaps signaling a start or full half of play soon for the dynamic Canadian forward.
“When you see Cloe Lacasse come on, you see that teams have to make a different strategy,” Coenraets said. “So you need that spark in a player, you need that player that really takes something from a responsibility point of view, and teams will adapt.”
Friday was the first time all season that the Royals have not had a single short-term injury to report, with the only three absences coming from Alex Loera and Tatumn Milazzo recovering from ACL tears, and Liv Griffitts away on maternity leave after giving birth to her first child with fellow former BYU athlete Kyle Griffitts earlier this month.
With a healthier squad comes more competition for minutes at each position, leading to Coenraets having to “leave players at home” for the first time all year, including BYU alum Mikayla Cluff.
“Right now was the very first game where we actually had to bring a very hard message to players, and I’m really curious how they will react on Monday,” Coenraets said. “Brecken Mozingo had an amazing training week, and she’s starting now. That’s how simple it goes: do your best, show us something, and you’ll be playing.”
Utah hits the road for three matches in a row to close out the month of August before returning home on Sept. 14 against the Houston Dash.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.ksl.com ’
