Jamaican Andy Williams made his 250th US Major League Soccer (MLS) appearance on Thursday night and enjoyed a rousing 4-1 win with Real Salt Lake (RSL) over defending champions Columbus Crew.

Williams entered the game as a 70th-minute substitute for hat-trick scorer Robbie Findley, at RSL's Rio Tinto Stadium.

The 31-year-old Williams, whose prominence in the news in the past year, has been more about his ill wife than his football exploits, is in his 12th year in the MLS. He is one of the most-travelled players in the league, having represented Columbus Crew, Miami Fusion, New England revolution, MetroStars and Chicago Fire, before signing with RSL in 2004.

Last July, his wife, Marcia, was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. She went through six bone-marrow biopsies, the last of which turned up a rare abnormality that will make her leukemia harder to cure.