Playoff positioning at stake for Galaxy, LAFC in third L.A. derby
Growing up in Orange County, Christian Ramirez remembers when the closest thing Southern California had to a soccer derby was a Galaxy-Chivas USA match. That rivalry wasn’t so much passionate as it was pathetic, though, with the Galaxy losing just four of 31 games to their StubHub Center roommates.
Now Ramirez is back in Southern California, traded from Minnesota United to the Los Angeles Football Club three weeks ago for as much as $1 million in allocation money. And the timing couldn’t have been better since Ramirez’s first road game with his new team will come Friday when LAFC heads down the freeway to meet the Galaxy for the third time in a series that is already one of most intense in MLS.
“These are the kinds of games that kids dream of playing in,” Ramirez, speaking in Spanish, said after training Thursday. “I grew up watching clasicos like America-Chivas, Nacional-Medellin. And now to have that here, it’s something great.”
There will be more than just intra-city bragging rights on the line, however, since a loss would be a serious blow to the Galaxy’s playoff hopes while anything short of a victory would further rattle the self-confidence of an LAFC team that gave up late multigoal leads to the Galaxy in their first two meetings, losing one and drawing the other.
“We know it’s a must-win,” said Galaxy midfielder Sebastian Lletget, whose team hasn’t won this month and is coming off a 5-0 loss in Seattle that equaled the most one-sided loss in franchise history.
Lletget’s coach, Sigi Schmid, disagrees.
“I don’t like to call games ‘must-win’ games,” he said. “It’s an important game for us as we need to get points. The sense of urgency is there.”
If anything, that sense of urgency has been heightened since the Galaxy will be missing three starters in midfielders Romain Alessandrini (bruised knee) and Gio dos Santos (quadriceps) and center back Michael Ciani (hamstring). Midfielder Jonathan dos Santos (groin strain) is doubtful.
But striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who missed the Seattle game rather than risk reinjuring his surgically repaired right knee on turf, will be back, needing two scores to become the third active player, behind Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, to reach 500 career goals.
“We see the table, we see the point totals,” Schmid continued. “For us, our No. 1 objective is to make the playoffs.”
To achieve that, Schmid figures the Galaxy (10-9-7) need at least 51 points since no team with that many has failed to reach the postseason since MLS adopted its current playoff format in 2015. But to get there, the Galaxy can afford to drop just 10 points in their final eight games.
They’ve dropped that many in the last two weeks alone.
LAFC (12-7-6) is heading in the other direction, having stopped a six-game winless streak with back-to-back shutouts, extending its franchise-record scoreless streak to 204 minutes while climbing into a tie for second in the Western Conference standings.
And with just one of its final eight games coming against a team that entered the weekend with a winning record, LAFC is well-positioned to become just the fourth MLS club to reach the playoffs in its inaugural season.
LAFC does have some business to take care of with the Galaxy though. In the teams’ first meeting, at the StubHub Center in March, Ibrahimovic scored two goals in the final 13 minutes of his MLS debut to turn a 3-0 Galaxy deficit into a 4-3 win. Then last month LAFC blew a 2-0 lead in the final eight minutes, settling for a 2-2 draw at home.
“Of course we think about it,” said LAFC’s Carlos Vela, who scored in the first seven minutes of each game. “We feel like we played better the last two games. [Now] we want to finish the job.”
Last month’s game at Banc of California Stadium was marred by several incidents, caught on videotape and shared on social media, in which LAFC fans harassed or attacked people wearing Galaxy jerseys. And 79 seats in the upper-deck section reserved for Galaxy fans were either destroyed or defaced, resulting in more than $7,000 in damage.
In the wake of those incidents, five LAFC fans received multimatch bans from the team’s stadium, the club said, while the Galaxy sanctioned its supporter groups by prohibiting them from bringing flags, banners and musical instruments to the last two home matches.
LAFC said it has arranged for eight buses to deliver people to the StubHub Center on Friday and expects about 1,000 of its supporters to attend the game despite the fact the Galaxy set aside just 132 tickets for away fans, the same number LAFC made available for Galaxy fans at its stadium.
Jason Skeen, a captain with the Carson station of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, one of four groups providing security Friday, said he is prepared.
“We recognize there is passion between these two teams,” he said. “We recognize what happened in the last game. So we’re aware.
“I feel comfortable with our plan.”
kevin.baxter@latimes.com | Twitter: @kbaxter11
