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Yahoo
2 days ago
- Sport
- Yahoo
Galaxy scores in final minute to force draw with LAFC in tense El Tráfico contest
The rivalry between the old-school Galaxy and its upstart neighbor LAFC was once the best in MLS. The Galaxy traces its roots to the inception of the league while LAFC helped define its modern era, setting up a turf war so good, so competitive and so emotional, it had its own nickname. Much of that drama had faded from El Tráfico in recent matches. But that changed Saturday when Maya Yoshida scored on the last touch of the game to give the Galaxy a 3-3 draw before a packed house of 22,301 at BMO Stadium. And the teams didn't limit their fight to the scoreboard. A tense shoving match broke out seconds into stoppage time, leading referee Guido Gonzalez to send off LAFC's Eddie Segura with a red card while handing two yellow cards to the Galaxy and one to LAFC goalkeeper Hugo Lloris. The most devastating punch, however, came from Yoshida, who was in the center of the shoving match. Minutes later his header off a cross from Mauricio Cuevas — his first goal and just his second shot on target of the season — capped a Galaxy comeback from a late 3-1 deficit. Gabriel Pec had the other two goals for the Galaxy while Denis Bouanga scored twice for LAFC, whose other goal came from Javairo Dilrosun. The draw gave the Galaxy (3-14-7) points in five of their last seven games, the team's best stretch of the season. LAFC (10-5-6) is unbeaten in four straight and has lost just once in 14 league games since April 5. But the two points it lost on Yoshida's goal dropped it to fifth in the Western Conference standings. Bouanga's fifth goal in six games gave LAFC the early lead in the 26th minute and, significantly, it was the first goal in that span that didn't come from the penalty spot. It also gave him a goal in his last six games against the Galaxy. Dilrosun doubled the lead with his second MLS goal on a counterattack five minutes later. Pec halved the deficit for the Galaxy on a penalty kick less than10 minutes before the intermission. That goal, set up by a Ryan Hollingshead hand ball in the box, snapped a 375-minute scoreless streak for LAFC. Bouanga extended the LAFC lead on another counterattack set up by a Galaxy mistake in the 67th minute. Afterward, as the teams walked back to the center circle, Pec and Galaxy defender Emilio Garces, who was out of position on the breakaway, engaged in a heated argument. Read more: Galaxy disciplines fans for rule violations while protesting team response to ICE raids Pec calmed down enough to get his fifth goal of the season, on a cross from Marco Reus, to pull his team closer in the 79th minute. The Galaxy then appeared to tie the score just before stoppage time, but Lloris made a spectacular kick save on Christian Ramirez while lying on his back on the goal line. That set the stage for Yoshida, however, with the Galaxy captain slipping in front of Nkosi Tafari to redirect a glancing header inside the far post, earning the Galaxy a league result at BMO Stadium for the first time since August 2021, a game that also ended in a 3-3 draw. Get the best, most interesting and strangest stories of the day from the L.A. sports scene and beyond from our newsletter The Sports Report. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Sport
- Yahoo
Pec has 2 goals, Yoshida scores in stoppage time for Galaxy in 3-3 tie with LAFC
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Gabriel Pec scored two goals and Maya Yoshida added a goal in the seventh minute of stoppage time for the LA Galaxy in a 3-3 tie with Los Angeles FC on Saturday night. Eddie Segura was shown a straight red card (violent conduct) in the first minute of stoppage time and LAFC played a man down the rest of the way. LAFC (10-5-7) has its string of three consecutive wins — all shutouts by goalkeeper Hugo Lloris — snapped. Yoshida flicked in a header, off an arcing ball-in played by defender Mauricio Cuevas, from the center of the area to cap the scoring. Denis Bouanga scored twice for LAFC. Bouanga has scored at least one goal in four consecutive games and has seven goal contributions (five goals, two assists) during that span. Pec converted from the penalty spot in the 36th minute and added a goal in the 79th — finishing off a string of quick crisp passes with a first-touch shot from the right-center of the area — for the Galaxy (3-14-7). The 24-year-old Pec, who had 30 goal contributions (16 goals, 14 assists) as an MLS rookie last season, has five goals and three assists this season. The Galaxy is 8-7-7 against LAFC all time in the regular season. Bouanga opened the scoring in the 22nd minute, his sixth consecutive game against the Galaxy with a goal. Bouanga perfectly timed his run onto a well-placed ball-ahead played by Ryan Hollingshead a blasted a first-touch shot into the net. Javairo Dilrosun stopped a low cross played from the left side by Nate Ordaz and then flicked in the finish from the right corner of the 6-yard box to give LAFC a 2-0 lead in the 31st. On a breakaway, Bouanga outraced the defense and then beat goalkeeper Novak Micovic, who crept off his line, with a rolling shot from near the penalty spot to make it 3-1 in the 67th. The Galaxy, the defending MLS Cup champions, lost 2-1 at home against Austin on Wednesday to snap their season-long three-game unbeaten streak. ___ AP soccer:
Associated Press
2 days ago
- Sport
- Associated Press
Pec has 2 goals, Yoshida scores in stoppage time for Galaxy in 3-3 tie with LAFC
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Gabriel Pec scored two goals and Maya Yoshida added a goal in the seventh minute of stoppage time for the LA Galaxy in a 3-3 tie with Los Angeles FC on Saturday night. Eddie Segura was shown a straight red card (violent conduct) in the first minute of stoppage time and LAFC played a man down the rest of the way. LAFC (10-5-7) has its string of three consecutive wins — all shutouts by goalkeeper Hugo Lloris — snapped. Yoshida flicked in a header, off an arcing ball-in played by defender Mauricio Cuevas, from the center of the area to cap the scoring. Denis Bouanga scored twice for LAFC. Bouanga has scored at least one goal in four consecutive games and has seven goal contributions (five goals, two assists) during that span. Pec converted from the penalty spot in the 36th minute and added a goal in the 79th — finishing off a string of quick crisp passes with a first-touch shot from the right-center of the area — for the Galaxy (3-14-7). The 24-year-old Pec, who had 30 goal contributions (16 goals, 14 assists) as an MLS rookie last season, has five goals and three assists this season. The Galaxy is 8-7-7 against LAFC all time in the regular season. Bouanga opened the scoring in the 22nd minute, his sixth consecutive game against the Galaxy with a goal. Bouanga perfectly timed his run onto a well-placed ball-ahead played by Ryan Hollingshead a blasted a first-touch shot into the net. Javairo Dilrosun stopped a low cross played from the left side by Nate Ordaz and then flicked in the finish from the right corner of the 6-yard box to give LAFC a 2-0 lead in the 31st. On a breakaway, Bouanga outraced the defense and then beat goalkeeper Novak Micovic, who crept off his line, with a rolling shot from near the penalty spot to make it 3-1 in the 67th. The Galaxy, the defending MLS Cup champions, lost 2-1 at home against Austin on Wednesday to snap their season-long three-game unbeaten streak. ___ AP soccer:
Yahoo
01-07-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
News Analysis: What's wrong with the Galaxy, who went from a championship to the cellar in one season?
Galaxy defender Maya Yoshida hoists the MLS Cup in December, which seems to be a million years ago in Galaxy time. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) The Galaxy continued to stumble through their terrible, horrible, no good, very bad season last week, taking just a point from two games against teams on the fringe of the playoff race. That left the reigning MLS champions with just one win and nine points from 20 games. If they continue at this pace, they'll set modern-era league records for most losses and fewest points while shattering virtually every team record for futility. Advertisement The team has done little to help itself off the pitch either. While LAFC and Angel City, Southern California's two other pro soccer teams, were quick to issue statements standing with fans during last month's heavy-handed immigration raids, the Galaxy's silence was deafening. That timidity angered two of the team's main supporters groups, who canceled viewing parties, travel to road matches and other game-related events. The average attendance of 21,594, according to is off more than 17% from last year and is the Galaxy's lowest for a non-COVID season since 2014. Then there's the coach, Greg Vanney, who took the team to a title after one of the worst seasons in franchise history in 2023, but is digging well below those depths this season. It's a plunge from grace with just one precedent in the history of U.S. pro sports: the 1998 Florida Marlins, who won just a third of their games and finished a distant last a year after winning their first World Series. Yet in many ways the Galaxy's demise is much worse. Advertisement In 1998, the Marlins surrendered before the season started, returning just two starters from their championship team. The Galaxy still have 10 of the 14 players they used in December's MLS Cup final. Read more: Struggling Galaxy lose to Colorado Rapids but insist they haven't given up hope The Galaxy have offered various their humiliating demise, none of which hold much water. Before the season had ever started, the team was saying bonuses and other costs associated with the championship had made the price of victory too high under the stingy MLS salary cap. To get under the cap, the Galaxy had to trade MLS Cup MVP Gastón Brugman, midfielder Mark Delgado, defender Jalen Neal and forward Dejan Joveljic, the leading scorer in the playoffs. Advertisement But every MLS Cup winner has had to make similar changes and three of the previous eight champions returned to the title game the following year. All but one of the eight posted a winning record. Next the Galaxy blamed injuries, especially the torn anterior cruciate ligament that has kept midfielder Riqui Puig, the team's best player, out all season. But Puig was injured in last November's Western Conference final and the team won the MLS Cup without him. The Galaxy also had the whole offseason to replace him. It's true that a rash of injuries early in the season sidelined more than half a dozen starters at one time or another. But other teams had injuries too and even when the Galaxy have been at full strength, as they have been for most of the schedule, they haven't won. So when went wrong and how can it be fixed? The first question is easier to answer than the second. Advertisement The Galaxy had a magical year in 2024, going unbeaten at Dignity Health Sports Park and matching a modern-era franchise records for wins with 19. Every key player had arguably the best season of his career. Four of them — Joveljic, Puig, Gabriel Pec and Joseph Paintsil — finished in double digits for goals. That had never happened in MLS. Nor had it ever happened for two of the four players. Before last season, only Paintsil and Joveljic had scored more than eight goals in a season. In fact, Pec's 16 goals in 2024 was double his previous best and his 12 assists were three times better. This season Pec and Paintsil have combined for four scores and three assists, as many goals as they scored together in one playoff game last fall. And they weren't the only ones far exceeding expectations. Advertisement Captain Maya Yoshida started all 39 MLS matches, including playoffs, last year and led the league in minutes played. Both figures were career highs; he's missed five starts already this season. Goalkeeper John McCarthy started a career-high 37 games, stopped nearly 74% of the shots he faced — his best mark in a season with more than 11 MLS starts — and had a 1.41 goals-against average. Read more: The Galaxy are back after beating the Red Bulls for the franchise's sixth MLS Cup He's lost his starting job this season. It's not unusual for a championship team to see multiple players have breakout seasons at the same time. What is unusual is the Galaxy have seen multiple important players have career-worst seasons at the same time. Advertisement McCarthy's save percentage is under 60% for the first time in a decade and his goals-against average of 2.36 is a career worst. Pec and Paintsil are on pace for their fewest goal contributions since 2021-22. And Colombian center back Emiro Garcés has become more a liability than an asset. As a result, the team has the fewest wins, has given up the most goals and has the worst goal differential in the league. Then there's Vanney. A defender on the Galaxy's original team in 1996, Vanney coached Toronto FC to the only treble in MLS history in 2017, then returned to L.A. in 2021 charged with reviving a team that had made one playoff appearance in five seasons. Instead he has a losing record in four-plus seasons and in 2023 he had the worst full season for a Galaxy coach, winning just eight games, a record he figures to shatter this season. Yet the team rewarded him with a multiyear contract extension in mid-May, when the Galaxy were 0-10-3. It's hard to imagine another team in a first-tier league anywhere in the world giving a coach with a winless record a three-year contract extension. Advertisement Read more: Commentary: The MLS Cup Curse is real, and the Galaxy are determined to beat it In many ways this season is reminiscent of 2023, when the supporters organized boycotts and paid to have banners flown over the stadium calling for the sacking of president Chris Klein and technical director Jovan Kirovski. Amid the turmoil, the Galaxy matched a full-season franchise low in wins but they also replaced Klein and Kirovski with general manager Will Kuntz, who won an MLS Cup in his first full season with the club. It was the biggest one-season turnaround in MLS history. So what can be done to fix that this time? Apparently very little because Kuntz has much less room to maneuver now than he did then. The Galaxy payroll of $22.9 million is fifth-highest in MLS and all three of his designated players — Puig, Pec and Paintsil — are signed through the 2027 season, as is Julian Aude, an under-22 initiative signing. Advertisement The Galaxy are hoping Puig's expected return late this summer sparks at least a modest revival but that won't be enough since Paintsil increasingly seems lost, his confidence shattered, and newcomers Matheus Nascimento and Lucas Sanabria have so far failed to live up to their promise. If the Galaxy had a magic season in 2024, this one has been cursed. And it's a spell that shows no sign of lifting. Get the best, most interesting and strangest stories of the day from the L.A. sports scene and beyond from our newsletter The Sports Report. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
New York Times
08-05-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
Already set up to struggle, MLS Cup champion LA Galaxy are snakebitten, too
When the LA Galaxy take the field against the New York Red Bulls on Saturday evening, it will have been 154 days since the two MLS originals squared off in last year's MLS Cup final. The Galaxy won that game, 2-1, returning to their place as the most decorated club in league history. That remains the last MLS game LA has won. Advertisement The Galaxy made MLS history last weekend when they lost to Sporting Kansas City 1-0 without giving up a shot. Not a shot on goal. Any sort of shot. The lone tally in the game came off an own goal from defender Maya Yoshida. It sent LA spiraling to an 11th consecutive game without a win to start the season (0-8-3, three points), another MLS record. 'When it rains, it f—ing pours, man,' LA goalkeeper John McCarthy said. 'You've got to figure out how to get out of it, and no one's going to help you besides the 28 guys in the locker room. You can't start looking around and going, 'Who's going to do it for us?' It's truly got to be an 'us' thing.' There were warning signs that this would be a difficult season for the Galaxy. They lost star player Riqui Puig to a torn ACL last season in the Western Conference championship and will be without their talisman for most of this season. That was an especially difficult task because so much about how the Galaxy played was built around Puig. His 13 goals and 15 assists didn't tell the full picture of his influence. No one in the league touched the ball more than he did last season; Puig led the category by nearly 500 touches. He also had the most passes and most pass attempts in the league. The Galaxy haven't found a way to totally adjust their style of play without him. Puig's absence was compounded by salary cap issues going into the season. The Galaxy was so tight up against the cap that they moved several players to get compliant. That included midfielder Mark Delgado, who has started nine games for LAFC this season; Gastón Brugman, who won MLS Cup MVP; and forward Dejan Joveljíc, who had 15 goals and six assists last season. The loss of three veteran players, as well as injury issues for stars Joseph Paintsil, Gabriel Pec and Marco Reus, who was expected to step up in Puig's absence, has made matters worse. Advertisement 'With each player we lost, we lost something,' Galaxy coach Greg Vanney said. 'Even when you talk about transition defending and cutting off the series of errors that maybe happen at the top part of the field and transition all the way down to the bottom part of the field. We have two very experienced midfielders who aren't with us anymore that cut off those types of errors, that make reads and understand their priorities. So we have younger midfielders in those situations who are learning these moments and that are going there. 'Each guy that we lost, there's a percentage of who we were that went out the door with those guys. And now we are trying to add new guys, build them up, get them to the same level.' Getting just 322 minutes out of Reus, the German legend, this season has been especially difficult. To be without a designated player and a highly-paid star like Reus, whose budget charge is at max TAM levels, is deadly in MLS. MLS roster rules are designed to top-load the roster. When high-paid players are injured or not producing, it can often spell disaster. It has this season for the Galaxy. Galaxy general manager Will Kuntz, who built the roster that won MLS Cup but now must figure a way to strengthen a group that is floundering, said the injuries and absences can't be seen as an excuse. 'We knew what we were doing, we pushed our chips into the middle of the table last year to try to make it happen,' Kuntz said. 'We took a little bit of an aggressive stance because we thought we had a chance to win. The league rules stuff is a crutch. It's a reality, but it's not unique to us.' MLS rules are essentially set up so that it's difficult for any one team to build a dynasty. There have been exceptions with teams who have had a level of sustained success. Most recently, the Seattle Sounders and Toronto FC stand out. Advertisement Vanney coached the Toronto teams that went to MLS Cup three times in four years from 2016-19, winning once. He pointed out this week that TFC also missed the playoffs in 2018, then rebuilt and got back to MLS Cup in 2019 and challenged for a Supporters' Shield in 2020. 'Every single year that you're successful, you've got to be able to sell one or two players to try to generate money back into your cap so you can pay off the things that help you to become a champion,' Vanney said. 'And so we're going through those stresses ourselves.' The Galaxy, one of the more dynamic attacking teams last season, has sputtered on the offensive end. Paintsil missed the first seven games of the season, but his return didn't seem to lift LA as one would have expected. The Ghanaian winger had 10 goals and 10 assists last season, but he has no goals in five starts this year. Pec had 16 goals and 14 assists in 2024, but he has just one goal and two assists in 10 starts. The Galaxy has also been poor defensively, especially at the start of the season. They are tied with a league-worst 21 goals conceded and have a league-worst minus-13 goal differential. But Vanney sees improvement on both ends of the pitch. He noted that the team has had improved chance creation and better movement on the attacking end, while also limiting some of the defensive mistakes that have plagued them this season. There are some indications that's true. The Galaxy has allowed one or fewer goals in three of the last four games — a 4-2 loss to Portland is the exception there — after giving up two goals or more in six of their first seven games. And while the goals haven't come, Vanney said he clipped together 14 'highly-positive' attacking moments against Sporting KC to show the team that the goals will start to come. Advertisement According to data pulled from TruMedia via StatsPerform (Opta), 19.5 percent of the Galaxy's chances over the last five games were 'big' chances, a slight uptick from the 15.8 percent of the first six games of the season. The Galaxy still just aren't generating enough chances. Last year, they ranked fourth in MLS with 11.2 chances created per game. That has dropped this year to 8.9, tied with the Chicago Fire for 15th. The focus, Vanney said, has to be on the process rather than simply on the results – especially when those results have been so poor. He pointed to the fact that the Galaxy didn't give up a shot against Kansas City as evidence of the process even if the result was a historic loss. 'There's positive things inside of a sh—y result that we try to stay focused on so that we can utilize those things that are advantages going into the next game and not just sitting back and going, 'S—, we lost, and let's all feel terrible.' Because that doesn't help us in the next game either to try to create the margin we need for winning,' Vanney said. The key now is to find a way to create some momentum, because the season is quickly slipping away from LA. 'I do think that the results build confidence, right, it builds that positivity and that energy that you want to use to build momentum,' Vanney said. 'So I think those are key. Nobody has played us to a way that we feel like we were overwhelmed or we were really behind it in a game. And that's why I think the margins are thin for us to turn this thing into positive results. 'It's not big things, it's little things.'
