Real Salt Lake hoping to earn big crowd's support

SANDY — An at-capacity or near-capacity crowd is expected inside Rio Tinto Stadium on Saturday evening when Real Salt Lake takes on Mexican power Club America.

As of late Thursday afternoon, just 3,000 tickets remained available for Saturday's exhibition match, with many of those seats expected to go fast. However, while RSL has had several stellar crowds in the brief history of Rio Tinto Stadium that have roared on the home club, RSL's players and coaches know that Saturday's crowd probably won't be pro-RSL.

When told that Saturday's exhibition might be 50-50 — at best — in favor of the "home team," RSL midfielder Clint Mathis quickly retorted, "That's shooting high."

Indeed, Real Salt Lake's players and coaches are bracing for what will likely be a pro-Club America crowd inside their own stadium when they take one of the biggest soccer clubs in this hemisphere on Saturday.

"I think the typical American professional soccer player is very used to it by now, (and) has played in matches where, even though it's your own stadium, you're not the home team," said RSL coach Jason Kreis. "What also is there, though, is the opportunity to show those fans that you know how to play the game, too. What I've often seen in games like this is — if you do it right and you play well enough — you've got, by the end of the game, as many people on your side as are on theirs, even though they came to watch the other team."

For his part, Mathis echoed Kreis' sentiments about using the situation as an opportunity to try to win over new fans.

"It's gonna be one of those cases where we might not be, per se, the home team, which is OK. As long as we can show these hardcore fans that we have the same abilities and can play just as good as their favorite teams, hopefully we do win them over," Mathis said.

To do that, Mathis suggested Salt Lake need only to approach Saturday's game like it's any other — even if it's not.

"You just gotta treat it like a normal game," he said. "If we go out there and we're starting to play well, passing it around well, scoring, you'll actually see some of those fans come to our side. It's just one of those things that we have to go out, treat it like any game that we wanna go out and win ... If we can win those guys over, we're gonna have them here every other weekend."

e-mail: drasmussen@desnews.com