Loons lose again to top talent, fall 1-0 to LAFC

It’s getting harder and harder to tell if Minnesota United is having a really good season — or just hasn’t played very many really good teams. After a 1-0 loss at home to Los Angeles FC on Wednesday, with a Denis Bouanga penalty kick the only goal, the waters remain muddied.

The Loons have been in the top three of the standings for months, but they’ve now lost at home to all of the other three teams in the West’s top four (if you order them by points per game). Of Minnesota’s 11 wins in MLS this year, just one — away at Seattle — has come against a team in the West’s top seven spots.

Given that six of the Loons’ final 11 league games are against those top seven teams in the West, Minnesota is going to have to figure some things out when they’re playing teams that aren’t struggling in the lower half of the standings.

More than perhaps any other opponent this season, LAFC sat back and dared Minnesota to break them down. It was in some ways the Loons getting a taste of their own medicine, and they ended up looking like a lot of opposing teams have looked at Allianz Field this year: lots of progress-free passes in the defense, not much in the way of ideas about how to attack a team that sat back with five defenders and a non-pressing, deep-lying midfield bank.

It prevented Minnesota from ever getting its counter-attack out of first gear; without players pressing forward, LAFC left very little space behind, and space behind the defense is the commodity that Minnesota thrives on.

“I think we did fairly comfortably dominate large parts of that game,” manager Eric Ramsay said. “We’ve created a lot of half chances. We had a lot of territory, but we were we were lacking real precision around the top of the box.”

Throw in that the Loons couldn’t find a way to be effective on set pieces, for once, and it turned into a long night for the home team.

A slow, cagey first half was punctuated by a strange moment in the 40th minute — which ended up producing an LAFC penalty kick. Loons defender Nicolás Romero got tangled up with LAFC striker Jeremy Ebobisse as the latter made a run into the center of the penalty area, and both players went to the ground.

After a significant delay, referee Pierre-Luc Lauziere pointed to the penalty spot, then had conversations with the assistant referee as well as the VAR official, before finally confirming a spot kick – with the decision coming from the assistant referee, not from the center referee himself.

Bouanga converted the penalty, slamming it into the top corner, to provide the game’s only goal.

After a three-game homestand, Minnesota heads back on the road, with a late Saturday night game in Portland. The Loons have yet to take on the Timbers this season, and Portland has been in the playoff spots for much of the year — plus, the rowdy atmosphere at Providence Park always provides an extra test for visiting teams.