While some fans were calling for coach John Ellinger's head and others were already deeming the season a failure, the players and coaches knew better. Sure the club's season-opening loss at Chivas USA was an embarrassment, but the team knew it was just one game.

Real Salt Lake had 31 more chances to make amends for the April 2 debacle, and everyone vowed to stay positive. There was no in-house bickering among teammates, and instead the veteran group took responsibility as a team, and promised to get better as a team.

Saturday's 1-1 tie with Red Bull New York was another step in that process.

Just two weeks after doing virtually nothing right at Chivas, and one week after losing at Dallas despite playing "10 times better," according to Andy Williams, RSL earned its first result of the season against New York, a game the players believe they should've won.

It may have only been a draw, but that one point in the standings should help silence the critics begging for wholesale changes after opening day.

Don't think for a moment the players are just satisfied with a tie.

"I think it's disappointing, playing at home in the home opener, I think we should've won," said Williams. "We created more chances than they did."

The most noticeable difference in the last two games for Real Salt Lake was effort. It's hard to imagine how the players weren't fired up for the season opener at Chivas earlier this month, but for some reason they weren't, and the result was uninspired performances.

That's why so many fans were utterly discouraged after the 3-0 loss to Chivas. Generally speaking, fans can tolerate losses if the effort is there, but the team's apathetic debut had many wondering if 2006 was going to be a sorry sequel to the 2005 expansion season.

The last two games seemed to answer those questions as Salt Lake put together perhaps its best two-game sequence in franchise history in terms of effort and work rate. All 11 players fought for 90 minutes, something that rarely happened last year.

In Saturday's postgame press conference, in which Jason Kreis opened up his vault of emotions when talking about his game-tying goal just eight months after ACL surgery, he barely managed to keep his emotions in check when talking about his teammates' effort against the Red Bulls.

Assuming Real Salt Lake continues to bring the same effort each week, Ellinger believes the next step toward seizing the team's first victory is fairly simple.

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"(It's) in the final third, getting on the ends of the crosses," said Ellinger. "We've got guys making runs behind the player and not getting in front of the man, so it's just a matter of one or two more steps and getting that synchronization of getting on the ends of some good crosses, because I thought we had some good crosses today."

Salt Lake will continue sharpening up its offensive punch next Saturday when it visits the Houston Dynamo, a team on a two-game losing streak.

Defender Carey Talley is questionable for the game after injuring his hamstring midway through the second half against New York.


E-mail: jedward@desnews.com

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