Real Salt Lake Seeks Upset Ending

SEATTLE -- If David Beckham, Landon Donovan and the Los Angeles Galaxy are the focus of this Sunday's MLS Cup final (ESPN, 8:30 p.m. ET), then Real Salt Lake is the afterthought. The relatively anonymous, five-year-old club from the nation's 49th-most populous metro area could not be more different than the star-studded team whose presence forced organizers to release several thousand more tickets to fill the increased demand.

RSL has itself to blame for part of the collective yawn it's inspired. It finished the regular season 11-12-7, barely made the playoffs as the bottom seed and features players familiar to only the most devoted MLS observers. Yet there's a growing sense here this week that a Salt Lake triumph at Qwest Field wouldn't be that much of a shock, and that fielding the best players doesn't necessarily make you the better team.

The playmaker is an Argentine who was acquired from a club in Spain's third division. The midfield is anchored by the dreadlocked captain from the Washington, DC suburbs, a tireless 22-year-old Canadian and a paunchy Jamaican who's played for six MLS clubs. The go-to striker endured a two-month scoring drought during the regular season's stretch run. All of which should make the famous favorite from Hollywood a little nervous -- in the movies, the team of humble unknowns almost always wins in the end.

Real Salt Lake has messed with the script a couple of times already this fall and has made the most of its fortunate postseason berth. It swept the defending champion and top-seeded Columbus Crew in the two-game quarterfinal round, then went to Chicago last weekend and outlasted the favored Fire on penalty kicks. That result robbed us of a final that would have featured Mexican star Cuauhtehmoc Blanco and U.S. national team legend Brian McBride and was a somewhat shocking accomplishment for an RSL team that had won just two road games all year.

While many still are trying to figure out just who this team is, the Galaxy have taken notice.

"They've got six guys who can pull off pretty special plays in given moments, maybe seven guys," Landon Donovan said here. "When they get the ball and get moving and they're active and they have good rhythm, they're a very difficult team to beat."

And a few weeks ago, that finally started to happen. Considered a side that played pretty, if not always winning, soccer, RSL got in gear in mid-October and has gone 4-1-1 since. That streak was enough to land it in Sunday's final. The Argentine playmaker, Javier Morales, has engineered an attack that possesses the ball as well as any team in MLS. The striker, Robbie Findley, found his scoring touch just in time, and the captain, Kyle Beckerman, has inspired with his composure and grit. The buzz in Seattle is that RSL's momentum, crafty attackers and relatively even distribution of talent may be enough to beat the Galaxy.

But does a team that backed into the postseason losing more games than it won deserve to be a league champion? Would an RSL victory on Sunday serve only to end the best story in American soccer with an anticlimactic thud? Goalkeeper Nick Rimando said, "When you get to the playoffs, truth be told, records don't mean anything anymore. If you get there, you can do something."

Technically he's correct. RSL played by the rules and advanced. Yet at first glance there's something quite unsatisfying about a club with such a paltry resume playing for a title. Naturally, Salt Lake isn't apologizing for its presence here and predictably sees its Cup half-full.

"Our record definitely doesn't show what kind of team we have," RSL midfielder Clint Mathis told FanHouse. "At the end of the day, when the games got big and we needed to win, we played very well. It's just one more. We keep our fingers crossed and hopefully we play well in that one."

Coach Jason Kreis echoed those sentiments, telling FanHouse that, "I've known all along what my team is capable of. They've certainly shown it. In this season, if you look back at our games against the best opponents in the league, the teams we had a ton of respect for, we typically played very, very well and we had some phenomenal results this year, with some phenomenal soccer. So I know what my team is capable of, for sure."

Based upon its postseason performance, RSL deserves to be playing on Sunday. Based upon its full season, it does not deserve a championship. Even Kreis admitted that a victory would mean only "that we could show everybody we're moving in the right direction." But RSL's presence here is the price MLS pays for having a competitive league, and the possibility that an 11-12-7 team who had a good month might lift the Cup at Beckham and Donovan's expense is far more palatable than the predictable domination we see by a cartel of elite clubs in foreign competitions.

Thanks to the salary cap, MLS clubs are unable to win simply by outspending their rivals. As a result, there are almost no games during a given season where one team can be almost assured of victory, or where another can barely hope to compete. There is no Real Madrid-Xerez or Juventus-Catania. The playing field is level. Every MLS game is diffcult, and most are close.

In exchange for that parity -- that belief that any season could be your team's year or that any given game could produce any result -- we get clubs clustered together in the standings and the prospect of a side like Real Salt Lake sneaking into the playoffs and getting hot just in time. The alternative to an RSL championship is a league where the same two or three teams dominate each and every year. Kreis and company certainly don't have to apologize for reminding us that an unexpected or random result is better than knowing how the movie ends before the lights even dim. Even the favorites from Hollywood, who won their last MLS Cup with a 13-3-6 regular season record, would agree with that.