What’s wrong with Sporting Kansas City?
On Wednesday, playing at the New England Revolution, KC’s boys in blue gave up three goals and dropped their third game in a row. The former league-best defense has not recorded a shutout since June 27th – a span of 13 games – and the defending MLS Cup Champions need to find some answers fast.
Granted, the last few weeks third-stringer Jon Kempin has been forced into action after starter Eric Kronberg and backup Andy Gruenebaum went down. Kempin’s just not ready.
And I don’t think anyone’s going to try and seriously debate that.
However Gruenebaum – who’s been the best of the lot all season – was back for the New England game and turned in a solid all around performance and the team still lost.
The same can’t be said of a back line that featured Lawrence Olum starting in place of currently-in-the-doghouse Aurelien Collin.
“He hasn’t been in form.”
That’s about all KC boss Peter Vermes told MLSSoccer.com‘s Steve Brisendine when asked about the Frenchman’s status.
Ouch.
All evening, the Revs exploited KC’s flanks. Especially disappointing was the fact that KC
castoff Teal “I-have-no-touch-but-am-super-fast” Bunbury burned his former teammate Seth Sinovic down the right side over and over, and scored a fortuitous goal just before halftime to knot the score at one apiece.
If Teal’s shot didn’t deflect off Matt Besler, it was going out for a throw in.
The point is, Bunbury got in behind the defense all night, even with no actual ball skills, and made Sporting pay.
From there on out, it was all New England as Sporting collapsed into a team that could muster very little, especially with Benny Feilhaber and Dom Dwyer out for the game due to yellow card accumulation.
I mean, who’s going to create, well, anything – Claudio Bieler?
“When you don’t play with the kind of intensity that you need in this league, you’re always going to come up on the losing side,” said Vermes, who always goes back to the work ethic thing, which is totally his thing. But is that the problem, not working hard enough?
I have my doubts that simply trying harder and out-working opposing teams is going to work for much longer.
I get that that’s Vermes’ “style of play,” but it might be time to adjust a bit, not press like maniacs at ALL times leaving the defense wide open when a mistake is made. At least one player publicly denied that anything was wrong with Sporting’s style.
“We’re just going to keep playing the way we’ve been playing all season,” said Sal Zizzo after the tough loss. “We’re not going to change the way that we played just because of the last couple results.”
KC is on the road again Saturday, at the underachieving NY Red Bulls. A result would be great, but even just a solid performance at this point would do wonders for this team’s psyche.
Seth got punked on that fist goal and it would have been a handball on besler if it didn’t go in. They need stopper mid help and Dwyer back- in a bad way.
Sporting is missing Uri in a big way now. Too open to the counter. Last three games have shown that the easiest way to beat Sporting is to pack it in, as they have no one who can beat a player one-on-one up the middle, and to counter on a turnover. Most of the goals in the last three games have come that way. Sporting is missing a good holding midfielder right now.
Hopefully they will get their shit together. I don’t really think Vermes having them “try harder” is the answer. I actually think they run themselves ragged and good teams exploit that.
Yep, nothing left in the tank after they counter- particularly late in games. A good number of goals on Kempin came from simple deflections on set pieces that a more experienced goalie would have stopped or knocked out.