Aaron Herrera, Pablo Mastroeni on Real Salt Lake right back’s 70-yard goal

Sep 23, 2022 - 6:38 PM

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The world can’t stop talking about Aaron Herrera’s incredible goal against Atlas, and it’s hard to blame anyone. It’s burned permanently in my brain now, and I hope it never leaves.

Here’s what Aaron Herrera himself and RSL coach Pablo Mastroeni said about the goal in press availability following Real Salt Lake’s 2-1 loss to Atlas in a Leagues Cup Showcase match.

Aaron Herrera

How was the goal? (How did it make you feel?) Good.

I saw him off his line for pretty much the first half when we were building out of the back. On that specific throw, I was looking, and I saw him pretty far out. I was hoping they’d swing it around to me so I could touch and shoot it, and luckily, it happened to happen exactly how I was thinking about it. I just took the chance.

It’s bittersweet, for sure. It’s always cool when you score a goal, but if you don’t win, there’s not much to celebrate after the game, whereas if you score a goal and you do win, obviously it’s a party after the game. It’s a little bittersweet. We wanted to get the win. It was important to everybody who played today, to the whole staff. Just unfortunate not to get the win.

RSL coach Pablo Mastroeni

Ironically, as we were preparing for this game, we were working on our buildout, and trying to find our wingbacks and deciding what the height of our wingbacks are, knowing that they’re going to come. If they come with our wingback, we’re looking for the ball in behind to a forward running in the channel. And it was probably our first rep, and he gets the ball, and he tries the same damn shot in training. I did everything to not lose my head, and I said, alright, here we go again. And so, you know, players make plays, and tonight, Aaron made a fantastic play. I was screaming at him from the sidelines: Play forward, don’t go back. We want to play forward. And then he launches the ball, and I’m thinking to myself, where you playing forward to? But he played forward to the most dangerous area, which is in front of the goal. Fantastic awareness, fantastic goal.

No, he missed it pretty bad.