All they need is more: Pereyra drives long-awaited Loons victory

The World Cup break in the schedule adds a major asterisk, but even so, there's no getting around it: Minnesota United's 3-1 win against Atlante FC was their first victory in three months and nine days. It was their first home win in just short of four months. Slice it however you want; it's been too long.

The star of the show was Joaquín Pereyra, who had a hand in all three goals. He put the first on a platter for Mauricio González, turning the Atlante defense inside-out along the way; he scored the second by bursting out of midfield with the ball and beating the keeper; he finished the third, getting on the end of an extremely unselfish pass from Marcus Caldeira, the MNUFC2 striker that's made a case for more first-team time.

It's the type of performance the Loons have been missing, from the best players on their team. Not a solid performance, not a good performance - a game-changing performance, the kind of game in which the best player on the field plays like the best player on the field.

Minnesota's chosen roster-building method, and the current state of their academy pipeline, is a bit of a tightrope. The Loons aren't spending huge piles of money. They don't have vast shoals of young academy talent knocking on the door. They don't take huge swings, to use a baseball metaphor; they're focused on repeated small successes, on hitting singles and doubles. USL Championship players that come good. Off-the-radar signings from Latin America. Draft picks that develop into real talents. Solid MLS veterans.

It's a model that gives them endless flexibility. But, to continue the baseball metaphor, they can't afford to swing and miss very often - especially in the few spots that they're spending money on.

So they need their Designated Players, Pereyra and Kelvin Yeboah, to be the best players on the field. And they need their max-salary guys to provide the foundation. That's Tomás Chancalay, Michael Boxall, Bongokuhle Hlongwane, Julian Gressel, and Dominik Fitz, to list the five in order of MLS minutes this season.

Chancalay has played in every league game, and Boxall continues to anchor the defense. Gressel has been injured, though he did play 90 minutes against Atlante, in a central-midfield role, a positive sign both for fitness and for positional flexibility. But Hlongwane has just four starts in MLS, and Fitz has played 19 first-team minutes.

There are plenty of success stories and important players for Minnesota, of course. They're getting contributions from all four U-22 spots at this point (that's Owen Gène, Nicolás Romero, Nectarios Triantis, and González), and in Caldeira, and for that matter in Morris Duggan, they have a chance to continue their history of getting SuperDraft value.

But when the team doesn't spend a lot, they need to get value out of what they do spend. They need more nights like that one from Pereyra. In some ways, it feels like what's been their missing piece this season.

Notebook

• Kayne Rizvanovich and the USA U-20 team finally hit the wall at the Concacaf Championships, losing 2-0 to Mexico in the final. It was just the second and third goals conceded of the tournament for the 18-year-old Loons keeper. The game itself wasn't close; the USA didn't get a shot on target, and was out-shot 22-6 for the game, including 12-2 on shots from inside the area.
• Gopher women's soccer starts their season this weekend, hosting NDSU on Thursday and Georgia, ranked 19th in the country, on Sunday. Here is where I confess that I glossed over that Georgia game the first time because I thought "Oh yeah, because that's a conference game now," and it wasn't until I was typing this that I realized that somehow I'd mentally expanded the Big Ten even beyond its ridiculous current extent. All those random conference games against USC and Washington have snapped the college sports geography portion of my brain.