After playing twice on the road already, Sporting Kansas City hosted its home opener on Saturday at Sporting Park.
It still feels weird to say it without “LIVESTRONG,” and players and coaches still frequently slip when referring to their home field. But make no mistake, the organization wants to put as much distance between themselves and Lance Armstrong as possible – and yes, they did take the yellow chair out of the Victory Suite.
Unfortunately, though, no victory was to be had on a chilly afternoon in KCK, as the Chicago Fire came in and were content to pack it in and hope for a draw. Which I suppose isn’t all that surprising given that Chicago has yet to score a goal this season.
It’s the same tactic that teams have been using against Peter Vermes‘ squads for almost two seasons now, and it works in part because KC has trouble scoring goals. For some reason, rather than reacting and adjusting, Vermes seems to get more and more frustrated when teams do this.
“There’s nothing you can do when a team drops nine guys within a 24-yard space,” Vermes said after the game.
That’s just not true.
There’s a lot you can do. Teams wouldn’t be able to do this if KC had any consistent goal-scoring threat from the top of the 18.
The bottom line is a good team cannot be stopped with gimmicky formations. It’s bad teams that struggle with those tricks.
For what it’s worth, Sporting absolutely dominated possession all game long, roughly 75-25. But they only had 2 more shots on target (3) than the visitors (1).
KC still doesn’t have a guy- or combination of guys- that can receive the ball in the center of the pitch and be dangerous going toward the opponents’ goal. Almost invariably when Graham Zusi or Benny Feilhaber are in that sort of position, they are forced to play the ball wide or back, and the defense picks up on this and begins to overplay it even more. The one guy that does seem to have a knack for holding it in the middle and doing so unpredictably is Uri Rosell, but at his defensive midfield position, he’s not necessarily looking to score goals.
As the clock turned toward 90 minutes a goal seemed like a logical conclusion. In the 86th minute KC got its best chance of the day when Zusi broke free on a counter. Sapong played him back a nice 1-2 into the box but Zusi went near post and booted it into the 15th row.
A couple minutes later later the ref signaled full time, with the scoreboard left unused at 0-0.
“I mean, the other two weeks we only played well for 45 minutes 
each game,” explained Vermes. “So in those two weeks we had 90 minutes of good play and 90 minutes of sub par. This to me was a very good performance other than the fact that we didn’t get the goal but this is the way that we want to play.”
We heard that same sort of excuse from Vermes often last year after similar struggles to find the back of the net.
Jimmy Nielsen said what everyone knows:
“We’ve got to create a little bit more with our possession… We had 73 percent of the possession—that’s pretty good. But not scoring is not good.”
That was NOT fun. This team had offensive limitations WITH Kamara…without him, this could be a pretty ordinary team.
“One Response to Donnelly: Sporting Dominate Chicago in Scoreless Draw for Home Opener”
I am sorry but “Dominate” and “Scoreless draw” should not be in the same sentence.
The problem Sporting has, and every team knows it, is that they don’t have one single player who can beat a defender one-on-one. If you beat one defender in the middle of the field, the defender behind him has to step up to block the shooting lane, this opens up space for an attacker to make a run through the space that the second defender previously occupied.
On the outside, if you can beat the winger you can either cross the ball, or dribble toward the goal on the diagonal, which forces a second defender to step toward the ball to cut off a shot to the near post, and/or forces the defender who is standing at the sixteen guarding the attacking center midfielders to drop into the shooting lane.
Either way, by beating just one defender, the attackers now have even numbers with the defenders (if you are counting the goalkeeper) so at least one man is open. I have not seen a Sporting player beat a defender one-on-one yet this season. Last year the only player who could do that was Kei, and Sporting suffered similarly with a drought of goals.
Vermes can complain all he wants about teams slowing the game down and packing it in, but with the disparity in the league of home victories and road losses (the insane home-field-advantage prevalent in the MLS), teams consider getting a point on the road with a 0-0 tie a victory for the visiting team. This is not going to change. The only way you can get some space in the game is to score a goal and make the other team try to attack and just not defend and counter. Absent the ability to do so, get ready for a long season of boring Sporting home games.
The only way you combat bunker defense is get offensive firepower that can overcome it. We do not have that at this time, Bieler might not be that guy and we do not have anyone stepping up to really set him up. Offense will continue to suffer and Houston will continue to mug the Sporting midfield.
They need to beg Norwich City to send Kei back to KC. Going to be a long season without him or somebody like him. And no amount of $9 beers will dim the pain.
Fucking 9 dollar beers! I know that this site has had many comments on the price of beer at sporting events around KC, but fuck me. 9 dollar beers at an MLS game? What’s a beer go for at Arrowhead? I mean I guess the SKC marketing guys figured out that they can make more money on selling less 9 dollar beer than selling more 8 dollar beer? I think my ticket cost less than two Budweisers. Not cool man. You’re harshing my buzz.