LOS ANGELES — Houston Dynamo FC's summer signings provided a major boost to the Texans' playoff hopes on Saturday night with Ezequiel Ponce and Lawrence Ennali scoring a goal apiece in a massive 2-0 win over LAFC at BMO Stadium.
“Our team ends up, more times than not, playing better when we play teams that are ‘a little sexier.’” Dynamo head coach Ben Olsen said. “The glitz and glamor and the LA and the big names here, our players love that so they tend to play up to that level.”
"Road warrior mentality"
Controlling the game from the opening whistle with their usual dominant possession, Dynamo found a goal in each half — Ponce and Ennali’s first in MLS play — to hand the defending Western Conference champions just their second home loss of the season.
Boasting their seventh road win of the season, Houston’s away form has been key to keeping them in the playoff race this year by earning the second-most points away from home in the Western Conference (27 points).
“Fortunately for us, we've had some road warrior mentality and we've been able to pick up points. Sometimes it's not good at home, so again, some of the concentration responses have been on the road,” Olsen said.”That's a good quality because if we didn't we'd be much lower in the table.”
Ennali injured
Houston general manager Pat Onstad was busy in the Secondary Transfer Window, adding Ponce and Ennali as a club-record Designated Player and the largest U22 initiative signing in Dynamo history, respectively.
“We had faith that we could contend without those players, but this is a league where you’ve got to move forward and just always try to get better,” Olsen said. “We did it in Ponce and we did it with Ennali.”
Unfortunately, not all went according to plan for Houston on the night as Ennali slipped late and may have suffered a long-term injury.
“It’s sour right now because I think we may have lost a really, really good player for a while. I don’t know. The film looks like he slips a little bit on a field that’s recently laid down so it’s just a little cloud right now,” Olsen said. “It’s a great win really, but mostly our thoughts are with Lawrence right now. Hopefully the news that we’re getting is not true right now, that the knee is going to be okay, but we’ll see. It doesn’t look good.”
LAFC again
The win moves Houston into seventh place in the Western Conference, level on 40 points with both Portland Timbers above them in sixth and Seattle Sounders FC behind them in eighth. With such a tight Western Conference playoff battle, every point is crucial down the home stretch in Dynamo’s final eight games of the season beginning with a rematch against this same LAFC side back in Houston Saturday (8:30 pm ET | MLS Season Pass).
"Of course big matches require a little more attention, which in reality, it shouldn't be like that," Ponce said in spanish after the match. "That extra attention should be for every game. This is something we need to learn and get better at, but tonight we demonstrated that we are at the level of those big teams."
