LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA- WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 2015
In a season full of blowouts, the Los Angeles Temptation and Seattle Mist played the closest game imaginable on Saturday night, May 29, with the Temptation squeaking out a 14-13 win on the road at the ShoWare Center in Kent, Washington.
The showdown featured two of the league’s best and most-accomplished quarterbacks in L.A.’s Ashley Salerno and Seattle’s KK Matheny. With the Temptation scoring 59 points in their previous game against the Las Vegas Sin, and Matheny’s scoring prowess, many fans expected a high-scoring aerial affair. Instead, they got an exciting defensive battle with crunching tackles, red-zone failures and momentum-changing turnovers.
The big key to the game was the red-zone play on both sides. Ashley Salerno and her offense failed to score at all during their four trips in the red-zone. Without their two big pass plays, it would have been hard for the Temptation to put any points on the board. Los Angeles also played a great game in the red-zone defensively against Seattle, as they held the Mist offense on five of their red-zone seven chances, one being the crucial stop during the Mist’s last drive of the game. Championship defenses are known to deliver big stops when it matters, and the Temptation certainly did that on Friday night.
Perhaps the teams were just very evenly matched, but Temptation Defensive Coach Tui Suiaunoa had a more than a hunch as to why the game was so close.
“You gotta remember, Danika Brace played for me last year, and knows every one of our plays because I ran it in Las Vegas with her,” Suiaunoa said. “It was kind of like our offense literally playing against our own defense in practice, because we stop our offense all the time, too.”
It didn’t help, Suiaunoa added, that “our offense had a brain fart about who blocks who. It’s as if our plays were foreign to them and written in another language.”
Naturally, Suiaunoa was pleased with the Temptation’s defensive coverage.
“The big story was how well my defense played in coverage and the pressure we put on KK Matheny,” Suiaunoa said. “We were able to force her to throw some bad passes because we played a very tight pass coverage, due mainly to Danielle Harvey and Michelle Angel. Our corners held their zones and our defensive ends applied the pressure we needed to eliminate any big plays by their offense.”
Temptation QB Ashley Salerno took a knee to the back while being tackled and suffered a deep bruise on lower back.
“She says she’ll be fine by game time, but we’ll just have to see,” Suiaunoa said.
“Hopefully you’ll see better blocking by us offensively,” said Suiaunoa. “Offensively, we need to stop Mist LB Danika Brace and safety Lily Granston who both played great defense against us. Defensively we are gonna do what we do well and keep the pressure on KK Matheny and do a better job stopping and do a better job stopping the run outside the red zone. In all four years that I’ve coached against the Mist, it has always been a 1- to 3-point game differential and has always come down to who has the ball last to win it. I don’t expect that to change. It will be another LA/Seattle classic battle!”
These teams will have a rematch this Saturday, June 6, at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Seattle will certainly have circled this game in red on the calendar, as the Temptation will be sitting pretty at 3-0 in the Western Conference if the Mist do not come out of Los Angeles with a win.
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