Angel City FC falls at home to Racing Louisville FC

LOS ANGELES — It was a wild and eventful night for Angel City Football Club Saturday.

Angel City trailed Racing Louisville FC twice, including by two goals just before the hour mark.

Madison Hammond earned a penalty as she was tackled to the ground on a corner kick, Alyssa Thompson converted and the ref issued a red card to Louisville’s Kaya Fischer.

Unfortunately for Angel City (4-4-2, 14 points), the nearly 30-minute stretch with a player advantage didn’t result in either a game-tying or winning goal, leaving the team with a 3-2 loss in front of 16,740 at BMO Stadium.

“I think in the first half, it was just tough for us to find connections,” Tiernan said. “Not finding the right spaces. It wasn’t very fluid, and we were kind of very disconnected.”

Angel City thought it had earned another penalty kick in the 84th minute on an apparent handball by a Racing Louisville player. However, the referee was never called over to the video monitor for a look, meaning the play wasn’t determined to meet the criteria for a handball.

The play, which was shown on the videoboard, drew loud chants from the home crowd, adding loud V-A-R chants, but things didn’t work out in their favor.

Interim coach Sam Laity said he wasn’t going to talk about the non-penalty call. It was his last game in charge, with new coach Alexander Straus taking over June 1.

“I’m disappointed that I’m leaving the team in that position for Alex,” Laity said.

Straus’ first game will be June 7 against the Chicago Stars.

Angel City enters the international break after a game where they likely should have secured at least one point.

“We made two or three silly mistakes, they gain momentum from that and we don’t do our job on set pieces and they score a goal,” Laity said. “That took the wind out of us a little bit. I still thought we were going to get something out of the game. Very discombobulated performance.”

Just on the other side of halftime, Riley Tiernan added to her goal collection with her sixth in rookie season, tying the game at 1-1.

“I just hit it and it went into the net,” Tiernan said.

Then, in five minutes, Racing Louisville took apparent control with goals from Emma Sears (53rd minute) and Savannah DeMelo (58th minute) for a 3-1 lead.

Saturday was the first home game for Angel City since defender Savy King collapsed in the May 9 game against the Utah Royals. Angel City had its first game after the incident last week on the road against Bay FC.

Racing Louisville scored first with Taylor Flint converting a penalty kick in the 23rd minute after Macey Hodge committed a handball violation. Racing Louisville would take the 1-0 lead into halftime.

This game kicked off a stretch of three consecutive at home for Angel City.