Union rally in tie at Austin FC with goals from Dániel Gazdag and Mikael Uhre

The Union blew a lead in the second half in disastrous fashion, but rallied afterward for a 2-2 tie at Austin FC on Saturday night.

Dániel Gazdag opened the scoring for the Union (0-0-3, 3 points) with a 14th-minute penalty kick. Austin (0-1-3, 3 points) scored both of its goals in a four-minute flurry of woeful Union play, Diego Rubio in the 55th and Jon Gallagher in the 58th. But Mikael Uhre saved the day with his third goal of the season, sticking home the equalizer in the 65th.

Referee Wesley Costa was busy early, whistling Austin for four fouls in the first 10 minutes. One gave the Union a free kick not far outside the 18-yard box. Kai Wagner fired it straight into Austin’s defensive wall, and it deflected out for a corner off Alex Ring’s outstretched left hand in the 18-yard box. The play happened too fast in real time for Costa to see the handball. But video review official Frank Anderson quickly let Costa know, and when he went to the monitor he didn’t need long. Gazdag soon stepped up and buried it.

The statisticians at MLS headquarters said Gazdag is the first player in league history to convert each of his first 20 penalty kicks taken in regulation (excluding shootouts) of league games.

At halftime, the Union had a 9-3 advantage in shots. Austin came close on a few occasions but didn’t put any attempts officially on target.

There was an ounce of bad luck in Austin’s equalizer, because Hector Jimenez′s cross hit Jack McGlynn on its way toward the back post. But nothing else about it was luck: Damion Lowe swung and missed at the ball, and Jack Elliott got flat-out beat by Rubio’s run behind him.

Austin’s second goal was even worse. The Union’s defense was again unsettled by a cross, this time from Owen Wolff far up the right wing. Lowe missed the ball again when he slid, Quinn Sullivan was late to arrive, and Gallagher had no one within 5 yards of him as he ran to the ball and slammed it across Andre Blake’s goalmouth.

It was bad of a stretch as anything we saw against Pachuca. Even worse, really, because the Union had been leading, and Austin isn’t a very good team, even at home.

The game was threatening to spiral out of the Union’s control at that point. But it didn’t, thanks to a moment of slowing the game down.

Martínez intercepted an Austin pass — a bit dangerously with a high kick next to Ring, but he got away with it — then found himself without a defender close to him. So he waited to make his next move, knowing Nathan Harriel was charging up the right wing.

Once Harriel had gone forward enough, Martínez passed to him. Harriel whipped a low cross into traffic, it bounced around, and Uhre jumped on the loose ball for a first-time finish.

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Three minutes after that, Curtin made his first substitution of the night. Alejandro Bedoya entered, Uhre exited, and Sullivan moved up to where Uhre had been on the front line. In the 86th, Sullivan exited for Chris Donovan.

Carranza had a good chance to win it in the 88th at the end of a buildup with Bedoya, Donovan, and Gazdag down the right side. Alas shot high after receiving Gazdag’s pass. And Donovan was perhaps guilty of passing up a few moments along the way where he had a good look if he wanted it.

Austin had a few good looks of their own in stoppage time, but Martínez, Wagner, and Blake did enough to make stops. Star playmaker Sebastian Driussi, a second-half substitute in his return from injury, came closest with a shot wide in the 95th.

As the referee lockout continues, so does this part of each game story. This was Costa’s fourth game of the year. He called 18 fouls on the Union and 12 on Austin, and there could have been more. Costa gave six yellow cards to the Union and three to Austin.

Late in second-half stoppage time, Austin’s Wolff and Wagner were in a collision that Wagner initiated with a shove. Wolff then kicked upward while Wagner was on top of him. As the players argued, the broadcast showed Costa going to his back pocket to pull out a red card, then deciding to not.

There seems to be no end in sight to the lockout right now. Major League Soccer commissioner Don Garber claimed to The Athletic on Wednesday that the league’s in-house public opinion surveys have found “no consumer blowback” over the lesser pedigree of the replacement officials.

“I read your columns and I read other media reports: this view that it is having a negative impact on the league,” he said. “Not only do we not see that through the research we do, but we’ve got to look at where we are. The replacement officials are — not by our standards, but by the standards of PRO [the management-side Professional Referee Organization] — are up to a [professional] standard.”