The objective is clear for the Los Angeles Football Club heading into matchday two of the FIFA Club World Cup.
“Has to be a win,” veteran fullback Ryan Hollingshead said. “There’s no other mindset for us. It’s everything. We’ve got to get three points out of the next game and see what we need to do in the third game to move on.”
After LAFC’s 2-0 defeat to English Premier League power Chelsea FC on Monday in Atlanta, Group D resumes Friday in Nashville, where the Black & Gold will try to build on a performance that left the team feeling positive about where they stood despite losing the first competitive match between professional clubs from the United States and England.
“What we really wanted to see is that we played with courage and that’s what the guys did,” LAFC head coach Steve Cherundolo said. “I think players took a little bit of time to catch up the speed and get used to an opponent that closes down very quickly. Windows that you normally have and space you normally have in MLS play is closed down extremely quickly. I think our players adapted pretty well.”
LAFC’s early naivete led to sloppy passes, poor runs and the feeling that they had to rush with the ball.
“We were a little bit too anxious,” said Hollingshead in the wake of LAFC’s first loss since April 9, the CONCACAF Champions Cup quarterfinals exit at Inter Miami.
Still, LAFC created enough chances that the players were more upset about not being clinical enough to capitalize than anything else.
Next up at GEODIS Park, the home of Nashville SC, LAFC faces Espérance de Tunis, one of four participants in the 32-team field from Africa.
Compared to Chelsea, the Tunisians are “a completely different team and style of play,” Cherundolo said. ES Tunis brings more verticality and directness featuring talented players in transition who go after second balls. Cherundolo expects the game to look more chaotic than against Chelsea, which will change moments and how they’re created.
Set pieces, balls into the box, long balls, scrambles for rebounds, hard tackling and the awareness that anything other than a victory means a likely trip home when the group stage ends set up a situation in which LAFC will try to control the chaos and slow the game down with structure as events warrant.
“I think that is really important for us,” said Cherundolo, whose teams have played both ways since he took the LAFC job in 2022.
Like the Black & Gold, ES Tunis, known as the “Blood and Gold” for their red and gold uniforms, fell 2-0 in the opening round to Brazil’s Flamengo.
Also like LAFC, a slow start to the Club World Cup snapped a string of 10 straight successful results, all domestic, going back to a Confederation of African Football Champions League quarterfinals setback on April 8 against fellow Club World Cup participant, the Mamelodi Sundowns.
This marks the fourth trip to the Club World Cup for ES Tunis, which was founded in a north African cafe in 1919. They claimed their spot via the CAF ranking pathway based on strong results the past four seasons, and have appeared in the continent’s Champions League for 14 straight years.
Like everyone else, winning brought Tunis, a four-time African champion and 34-time Tunisian league champion, to a tournament where each team brought that sensibility with them because back home that’s what they are.
Against the world, though, goals and victories become increasingly tougher to produce.
“Now that results have gone either for or against certain teams, you might see different approaches,” Cherundolo said. “Domestic leagues, most of the clubs going through this tournament, are the ones who are dominant. And that is not the case here, obviously. So sometimes it’s adjusting to a different style of play or a different match plan that you’re normally used to.
“For us it’s more of the same. But for certain teams, and our opponent tomorrow, they’re certainly more used to having possession in the domestic league. And the team is drilled that way, which obviously wasn’t the case against Flamengo, and hopefully isn’t the case [on Friday].”
FIFA CLUB WORLD CUP
Who: LAFC vs. ES Tunis
When: 3 p.m. Friday
Where: GEODIS Park, Nashville
TV/radio: DAZN.com, DAZN App/LAFC.com (English and Spanish)
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