Guilherme Biro's Stoppage-Time Equalizer Earns Austin FC a 1-1 Draw With San Jose

The scoreboard read 90'+6. The thermometer read 92 degrees. And Bruce Arena, by the sound of his postgame press conference, had seen this movie before.

Guilherme Biro, a center back, finished a loose ball in the sixth minute of stoppage time to give Austin FC a 1-1 draw with the San Jose Earthquakes on Saturday night at Q2 Stadium. Beau Leroux had put San Jose ahead in the eighth minute, and for nearly 90 minutes after that, the Quakes bent without breaking. Then they broke.

Early Punch, Instant Plot Twist

San Jose wasted no time. In the eighth minute, Niko Tsakiris and Leroux traded passes at the edge of the area on the left, and Leroux slid a left-footed shot low into the bottom right corner past Brad Stuver. According to the Earthquakes, it was Leroux's fourth MLS goal of the season and his first from inside the box, his first three having come from long range.

Austin thought it had an immediate answer. Two minutes later, Facundo Torres put the ball in the net, but a VAR review ruled he had handled it first, and the goal came off the board in the 12th minute. The Earthquakes noted that Besard Sabovic had set Torres up in the box before the review wiped it out.

From there, the first half turned into a siege on set pieces. Biro had already sent a header just off target from a Torres corner in the second minute, and he steered another header just wide in the 37th. Daniel Munie forced the only first-half save from Stuver at the other end in the 29th. The closest Austin came was in the 43rd minute, when Brandon Vázquez rose to meet a Jon Gallagher cross and rattled the right post. San Jose took the 1-0 lead into a break that followed six minutes of added time.

The Long Squeeze

The second half tilted toward Austin, in the scrappy, sweaty way that late-summer Texas soccer tends to look. Vázquez went close from the right side of the box in the 55th and blasted over from the middle in the 69th. Austin's bench went to work: Zan Kolmanic and Jon Bell came on in the 61st, Christian Ramirez and Przemyslaw Placheta in the 70th, and Brendan Hines-Ike replaced the injured Mikkel Desler in the 75th.

Angus Gunn kept the door shut. He stopped Torres from the center of the box in the 77th minute, a kick save by San Jose's account, then stopped him again from almost the same spot three minutes later off a Kolmanic cross. Vázquez headed wide in between. Arena sent on Ian Harkes, Jack Jasinski and Vítor Costa in a triple change in the 81st, then Nick Fernandez in the 88th, and Stuver was booked in the 87th.

Six minutes of stoppage time were announced. Austin needed all of them. Biro had a header from a Kolmanic cross blocked in the 94th minute. Two minutes later, the ball found its way to Ramirez in the box. Ramirez slipped it left to Biro, who finished with his left foot into the bottom right corner. Austin's recap calls it the last play of the game. San Jose's recap credits Vázquez with the header that started it, and Austin's lists him as a secondary assist.

Biro, Gunn and the Quiet Assassin

Guilherme Biro was Austin's most persistent threat, which is a strange sentence to write about a center back. He took four shots, three of them headers off corners and crosses, and scored with the one he hit with his foot.

Angus Gunn made two saves, both on Torres, both from close range. On a night when Austin piled up 16 shots, he and a San Jose back line that cleared 27 balls kept the visitors in front until the last whistle was nearly in sight.

Beau Leroux scored the opener and took four shots, the most of any San Jose player. Tsakiris, meanwhile, collected his team-leading eighth assist, which the club says was his first goal contribution since he returned on Aug. 15 from a groin injury that cost him seven matches.

Brandon Vázquez had five shots and the post to show for it, but none on target. Austin's No. 9 was everywhere except the scoresheet.

The Two Minutes That Rewrote the Night

The turning point came twice. The first was in the 10th minute, when VAR erased Torres's equalizer and handed San Jose a lead it would sit on for most of the evening. The second was the final sequence, when the Quakes' bend-don't-break act finally snapped. Arena, to his credit, pointed the finger partly at himself.

"Maybe I need to do a better job with the group with coaching them and making it clear how we need to close the games out," Arena said. "I need to do a better job with substitutions as well, so it's not just the players. The coach needs to do a better job as well."

Stats That Matter

• Shots: Austin 16, San Jose 10. On target: Austin 3, San Jose 2.
• Crosses: Austin attempted 27 and completed 11; San Jose went 5 of 15.
• Possession: Austin 52.3 percent, San Jose 47.7 percent.
• Clearances: San Jose 27, Austin 24.
• Saves: Gunn 2, Stuver 1.

Two Points That Got Away

San Jose moved to 10-5-8 with 35 points, which the club says leaves it fifth in the Western Conference. The point extends a run against Austin, too: the Quakes are unbeaten in three against Austin after winning the last two regular-season meetings, including a 5-1 rout on April 22, but per the club they still have not won at Q2 Stadium since a 4-3 victory on Sept. 18, 2021. Arena, whose side drew 0-0 at Houston the previous Saturday, saw a familiar pattern.

"We've wasted too many games this year at the end," Arena said. "The lesson to learn is how to close a game."

Austin moved to 6-7-10 with 25 points, 14th in the West according to San Jose's recap. After a 2-1 win at Portland last weekend, a stoppage-time point keeps some momentum alive. Austin hosts the Colorado Rapids on Wednesday, while San Jose wraps up a three-game road trip at San Diego FC the same night.

Closing Time

Every team in MLS has a Semisonic problem eventually: closing time comes, and somebody has to go home. On Saturday it was supposed to be Austin. Instead, a center back turned up in the box at the end of a sweltering night, and the Quakes walked out of Texas with one point and a coach promising to fix the final act.

Stats from ESPN's match data. Postgame quotes and match notes as reported by the San Jose Earthquakes (sjearthquakes.com); additional details from Austin FC (austinfc.com).