CONCACAF Champions League: Marathon Holds At Home, Beats Seattle 2-1

SB Nation’s Seattle Sounders blog, Sounder at Heart, had the coverage:

For more on last night’s match, you can visit the match coverage at Sounder at Heart.

A field muddied by a pre-match downpour saw El Salvador’s FAS hold Toluca to a 0-0 draw despite the Red Devils being awarded a late penalty kick.

Manuel Perez put his penalty attempt off the crossbar and did the same with his rebound attempt, failing to convert one of the match’s two clear chances. The misses also killed the momentum Toluca’d build up over the second-half, with a period of pressure creating the penalty on Manuel Salazar.

Visiting Santos Laguna raced to an easy 5-2 win over Trinidad and Tobago’s Joe Public behind four goals from José Cárdenas.

The Mexican attacker, who has not scored a league goal since moving to Santos from Pachuca two years ago, started his night in the ninth minute, beating Glenroy Samuel to the `keeper’s lower right after the Joe Public defense failed to close him down, 15 yards from goal. After settling a ball knocked-down to him, Cárdenas put a right-footed shot off the inside of the post, giving Santos a 1-0 lead.

Columbus opened their 2010-11 CONCACAF Champions League with a controlled, 1-0 victory over Municipal. Though the visiting Guatemalan club had three shots on goal, Columbus was the more dangerous side throughout the match, with Emmanuel Ekpo’s 14th minute goal providing the winning margin.

Four minutes after Municipal’s Pando Ramirez had the match’s first scoring chance, Ekpo put forth a great individual effort, beating three Municipal players before rifling his 16-yard shot off the inside of Jaime Penedo’s far post, banging in the match’s only goal.

The travel and strange stadiums. Quick turnarounds and little-known opposition. Confederation soccer provides enough new challenges to explain why some teams show drastically different results between domestic and “continental” competitions. The Los Angeles Galaxy-Puerto Rico preliminary was this year’s exemplar, though it happens every year. A team like Los Angeles may be in-tune with the challenges of their domestic league, while on the continent they run into a team that has experience with the new elements.

Real Salt Lake has never been in Champions League. That’s not to say they’ll go the way of the Galaxy. After all, Toronto is stringing together results, and their only previous experience in Champions League was losing in the preliminary round to Puerto Rico. Perhaps that’s sufficient experience, but it’s not much more than Real Salt Lake carries into tonight’s match against Árabe Unido.

Though they leave Mexico with no points, Saprissa seemingly have reason to believe this tournament will be better than last year’s, when they won only one of six matches while finishing third in their group. Their performance at Monterrey, controlling much of the match’s second half, showed them capable of getting out of Group C. However, last season Los Morados lost their match in Mexico 2-0 (to Cruz Azul). Is this year’s performance much better than last’s? Perhaps.

As much as a supporter may want to focus on the second half, the most telling stretch of play may have been Monterrey’s first half dominance. This result could have been worse.

If the Group A preview left you wanting more, Black and Red United and Chest Rockwell are there to satiate, this time with a Group B Preview.

The Mexican power in the group is Santos Laguna, who kick-off group stage play tomorrow in Trinidad and Tobago. To Rockwell’s mind, Joe Public stand a chance against both Santos and Guatemala’s Municipal.

You know, these match-by-match capsules I do are cute-and-all, but when if you’re somebody named Chest Rockwell and you write for Black and Red United, SB Nation’s DC United blog, you don’t go operating in the micro-verse. You go big.

And that’s what Chest has done with his CONCACAF Champions League Group A preview. Here’s a taste, Chest’s thoughts on Árabe Unido’s chance to replicate last tournament’s quarterfinals appearance:

Matches in Toronto, Bayamón (Puerto Rico) and Monterrey (Mexico) kick off CONCACAF Champions League group play tonight, three of the eight contest set to be staged over the next three days.

The match starts at 8 p.m. Eastern.