It’s August and the heat is on: Real Salt Lake knows it needs to start collecting wins as the MLS season hits the stretch run

Leave it up to one of the kids to put it into context.

“This is where teams have to have found their form and are hopefully clicking at this point in the season,” said Justen Glad. “This is it.”

Real Salt Lake’s 21-year-old center back isn’t fooling.

It might seem like there’s plenty of time left in RSL’s 2018 regular season with 12 matches remaining, but roughly 65 percent of the season is in the books, and RSL is clinging to one of the six playoff slots in the air-tight Western Conference race.

Only five points currently separate sixth-place RSL and 10th-place Seattle. So with back-to-back home matches on tap for RSL, starting Saturday evening against the scuffling Chicago Fire at Rio Tinto Stadium, there isn’t really any room for dropped points if the club is to stay above the red line.

After next week’s home match against visiting Montreal, RSL is on the road five of the following seven outings, and the road has been anything but kind (1-8-2) to RSL this year. That means RSL, winless in its last three, must begin padding its point total in the stifling summer heat and ward off the chasers.

“There’s a lot of teams that are around the same points,” midfielder Albert Rusnák said, “so every point, every win matters at this point of the season. We have two home games, so our target is to get six points and nothing less than that.”

Enter the Fire who have lost five straight league matches in which they’ve conceded 15 goals.

If RSL wants to snag its first win since July 7, it’ll certainly need its midfield playmaker, who left last weekend’s 0-0 draw at San Jose with a non-contact neck injury. Rusnák was sporting a neck brace in the days after the returning home, but participated partially in training earlier in the week and said he felt good enough to go Saturday.

“It was too painful to even move, never mind to play,” Rusnák said.

He watched the remainder of the match in the visitor’s locker room lying down.

RSL’s attack, while without a headliner in 2018, has been versatile and productive. Prior to the scoreless draw on the road last weekend, RSL had scored at least two goals in its last four matches. But the center forward position again remains a position in need of shoring up. Rookie Corey Baird has fared well — he and back-up Luis Silva are tied for second most goals on the team with five — but he hasn’t scored in a month.

The MLS transfer window closes on August 10, leaving less than a week for clubs to bolster their respective rosters.

Said RSL coach Mike Petke of the window’s final week: “We’re looking for the best possible situations and we get called constantly about a lot of players. We’re constantly calling around about other players. Trades just don’t happen very easily. One side always wants to get the better.

“If the opportunity comes up to add something that’ll improve the team, then we’re going to certainly [try to] do it, I’m going to want to do it and we’re going to see what we have to do to get it done.”

The match against the Fire could be the last time this RSL roster, as currently constructed, lines up at home. But as Glad noted, it is indeed “getting closer to that time” where you start to scoreboard watch and see the congestion in the standings.

“There’s always pressure to perform,” he said. “That’s the fun.”