Real Salt Lake: Team to keep, fine-tune its tactics

When Real Salt Lake unveiled its conservative 4-5-1 formation at Chivas USA a few weeks back, yet still lost and still failed to score a goal, defender Robbie Russell admitted second-guessing the tactics afterward.

"It's hard to go into a game like that and have a good mentality, have a good work ethic and still lose. It kind of makes you wonder if that was right," said Russell.

In coach Jason Kreis' mind, the approach in the Chivas USA match was excellent and was merely the foundation. His team continued to fine-tune its tactics out of the 4-5-1 formation throughout most of last week's training sessions, and the result was a scoreless draw at D.C. United.

It wasn't a completely satisfying result, but for a team that lost its previous four road games without scoring a goal, earning at least one point was a positive step forward.

It's hard to imagine RSL abandoning the 4-5-1 formation anytime soon, particularly on the road.

"I'm very cautious to say we should change our thinking right now, we've established a good mentality on the road with what needs to happen. I think that we're creating the right number of chances to have walked out of D.C. with three points, but we're happy for the one point we had," said Kreis, whose team travels to San Jose this Saturday. "I don't know that there needs to be a whole lot changed. I don't think we now need to be saying, 'Forget all that defense stuff; now we're just talking about offense.' "

The next step is finding a balance between defending and attacking.

With one-third of the season in the books, Real Salt Lake is one of six teams that hasn't won a road game, but it and New York are the only teams that haven't scored a goal away from home.

Surprisingly, the scoring opportunities have been there for RSL in the past two matches despite the switch from its base 4-4-2 formation to the 4-5-1 formation.

With his club's history of struggles on the road, Kreis moved to the 4-5-1 to drop as many players as possible behind the ball when defending and become a difficult team to break down. When in possession, though, Kreis wants his team to attack out of a 4-3-3 formation with his outside midfielders pushing up.

From a defensive standpoint it worked wonderfully, as D.C. United found breaking down RSL impossible with just one shot on goal.

"The last week we put so much talk, so much focus was about getting back to the team that's brought us this far, and the focus of that building process has always been about how we defend. So we focused very much on the defensive side of things," said Kreis. "Now we're hoping to build off that. Now, obviously, the three points and the goal is what we're after."

E-mail: jedward@desnews.com