Christian Poidevin, Shilo Klein and Hugh Roach each scored two tries as the San Diego Legion (7-5, 38 points, 2nd West) earned a 45-36 victory over the Eastern Conference’s NOLA Gold (4-7, 28 points, 4th East).
The Legion finished a stretch of 3 matches in 9 days, earning 12 of the possible 15 points with their two wins and getting each four-try bonus point. Their 7-point loss to the Utah Warriors on Wednesday accounts for the other point they earned.
“If you said to me at the start of the three games [that] we’d take 12 points, I would have been pretty happy with that,” head coach John Manenti said.
“We’ll take the win and move on, but we know that performance is not going to be a performance that puts you in the finals and makes us competitive to the back end of the year,” Manenti said.
Hugh Roach opened the scoring in the fifth minute. Poidevin jumped over NOLA defenders for his first try of the match in the 12th minute. Connor Tupai added one in the 22nd minute.
However, NOLA scored 17 unanswered points to end the first half and took a 24-21 lead into the half.
“We actually started doing everything we wanted to do in the first 10-15 minutes and we were up 14-0, and then, I think we started playing away from how we want to play: pushing passes, a lot of dropped balls,” Manenti said.
In the second half, it was the more consistent San Diego team that Manenti wanted.
“I think we just had to get back to the basics, really,” said Shilo Klein, who earned his first multi-try effort of the season off the bench on his 26th birthday. “I think that sometimes we overplayed our hand a little bit, just got too excited and too eager early.”
After he entered the match to begin the second half, Klein put the Legion ahead with his first try in the 42nd minute.
Roach scored his second of the match in the 62nd minute to give the Legion a 33-31 lead at the time.
Klein’s and Poidevin’s second tries of the match in the 66th and 71st minutes extended San Diego’s lead with a couple insurance tries.
Both the Utah Warriors (8-3, 41 points, 1st West) and Houston SaberCats (7-4, 37 points, 3rd West), who the Legion were chasing in the Western Conference, lost their matches earlier on Sunday which opened the door for San Diego to surpass the SaberCats before they meet next Saturday, May 10, at Torero Stadium.
With the win, they trail the Warriors now by just three points. It also put the Legion 10 points ahead of the fifth-place Seattle Seawolves in a Western Conference that’ll have 4 of 5 teams make the playoffs.
New Orleans, head coached by Danny Lee who led the Legion to the MLR Championship in 2023, entered the match holding onto a playoff spot in third place, but two points from being pushed to fifth in the east. They now lead Miami for the final playoff spot by just a point.
“The boys really respect [Lee] and really enjoyed being coached by him. But obviously, there’s a little bit extra there when you’re going up against anybody familiar, so yeah, it was an awesome experience to challenge ourselves against, I guess, a familiar force,” Klein said.
Klein played for San Diego in 2023 under Lee and returned this season after he played in Super Rugby last season.
Up next: The Legion get their biggest test yet against the Houston SaberCats in their next match on Saturday, May 10. San Diego lost in the first meeting between the two longtime Western Conference foes in a 34-14 beating in Houston. This time in San Diego, the kickoff is set for 7 p.m. at Torero Stadium.