Sporting Kansas City Scouting Report: On Nervous Cornered Animals

You don't this Portland...wait. Maybe you do...

When I first sat down to type this, I thought Sporting Kansas City hosted this one. They don’t, of course, and that only makes this game the most-winniest of the season so far for the Portland Timbers. If the Timbers can’t win this one, what’s there left to do but cast all the spells and sacrifice all the goats necessary to keep the New England Revolution between Portland and The Wooden Spoon?

Now, to dig into why that is:

The Basics
2-6-5, 11 pts., 21 gf, 24 ga (-3); home 1-3-3, away 1-3-2; 13th in West, 23rd overall
Last 10: WLWTLTLLLL
Venue: HHAHHHAAHA

Like the Timbers, basically, only a little worse on offense and a little better defensively, but with the same gently underwater goal differential.

Even then, the “little better defensively” needs adjusting. SKC have allowed two goals or more in seven of their past 10 games and, bluntly, they don’t look good defensively. Based on some recent highlights (home draw v St. Louis, home loss v Houston, and the road loss at Minnesota) and vast swaths of last weekend’s loss at Austin FC, SKC hands out good looks like sweet, sweet candy – up to 5+ primo chances per game. Set-piece defending is a problem – just over 1/3 of all goals allowed - and they have given up a bushel of points (bushel=14 points) from leading positions. And that was before dropping some more at Austin.

Despite all the above, (far too) long-time head coach Peter Vermes only seems to change his starting XI when injuries or disciplinary actions make him. He recently flirted with a 4-2-3-1, but I see a lot of 4-3-3 in SKC’s past and that’s what Vermes rolled with in the last two road games as well. That 4-3-3 has been populated like so in recent weeks (the steadiest regulars are bolded):

FC Cincinnati 3-3 (4-2) Sporting Kansas City: My Butthole Is Still Puckered

The bar for a bad performance, in green and black.

I doubt any team in Major League Soccer can make as strong a case that they should “save it for league” as FC Cincinnati. When you’ve got a shot at a record-setting season, I mean, why not?

At the risk of overselling the argument, what happens to Cincy’s chances of winning the Shield (which I covet) if, say, both Matt Miazga and Obinna Nwobodo went down?

Cincinnati fans may or may not have got a glimpse of that in yesterday’s freakishly nervy, overtime, skin-of-their-teeth-and-chinny-chin-chins 3-3, plus 4-2 in PKs win over a Sporting Kansas City team that usually slums in every house they visit. SKC came within a minute of winning the game outright, but, per the recent run of results, they self-sabotage often and with alacrity. Now...the tale of the tape.

The conversation about how much squad rotation hurt the cause starts with Nick Hagglund’s nightmare start, which featured two mistakes so glaring and close enough together as to give aid and comfort to the reigning MLS King of Boner performances, Austin’s Kipp Keller. Hagglund bookended his three-minute nightmare with a net-bursting own-goal on the front end and a blown marking assignment on a set-piece on the back end that gifted SKC’s Danny Rosero a point-blank header – the Mullet of Mistakes, if you will (that’s, uh, business in front, par...never mind).

Cincinnati responded on the field before it showed up on the scoreboard. They worked the historically vulnerable right of SKC’s defense with their own historically (very much) preferred left side of their attack like an early-80s pro wrestler struggling to get into the figure-four leg-lock – and do hold that thought because it became a major theme of the night. SKC punched back harder than expected: in keeping with head coach Peter Vermes’ theory of where they are, Kansas City does, in fact, move the ball quite fluidly; they got from their end of the field to Cincinnati’s well throughout the first half, sometimes artfully. One sequence in particular – e.g., the one that ended with Johnny Russell almost breaking in but-for Yerson Mosquera’s trailing leg – had the broadcast declaring this one of SKC’s best games of the 2023 season. “Vintage Sporting Kansas City” they called it...

Portland Timbers 2-1 Sporting Kansas City: Seeing a New Face in a Bad Mirror

An aesthetic and practical metaphor for Portland's defense.

You know what was most satisfying about the Portland Timbers temporally-vital 2-1 win over Sporting Kansas City last night?

Seeing the Timbers win the game on the kind of goal that ruined their 2020 season - and arguably the half season before that - was deeply satisfying, almost healing. The ball into the attacking third was good, but not spectacular, the ball after that was more hopeful than wise, but it still pipped through Andreau Fontas’s high five-hole, giving Marvin “Human Frustration” Loria the chance to run it down for something close to a tap-in. letting in that kind of messy shit has become Portland's stock-in-trade, but if SKC wants to take it off their hands, I'm good. That ugly bugger finished Portland’s come-back and gave me a flush of optimism for the season ahead. All in all, I’d call the win far more comfortable than pretty, but it wasn’t all that comfortable either, and that’s square one for my talking points:

“Something else that struck me: SKC’s goals looked like dunks - i.e., they forced the kinds of breakdowns that any good team can finish, they kept finding the right pass, etc.”

I pulled that comment from my MLS Week 7 review, specifically, the notes on Kansas City’s 3-2 win over Houston Dynamo FC because it gets to what has grown into a massive, which, here, means borderline pathological, pet peeve for me: for all their faults (hold that thought), SKC has been really good at pulling teams apart - as suggested by their (now) league-leading 17 goals scored. And I’d argue that’s how anyone concerned about Portland’s defense last night should apply that thought - i.e., wherever they looked ragged and panicked just remember they played a team that is good at that thing. Maybe I’ve danced around this point, maybe I’ve have tapped the proverbial sign about it, but, barring anything short of a ruthlessly effective system (e.g., Barcelona’s glory years), it’s…just weird to expect perfect control, composure and consistency from every player on [your team] in every game, especially when they play different teams with different players every week, players who have different strengths and weaknesses, and who do different things on and off the ball, and on and on and on. Every conversation about a team's success and failure should keep the quality of opposition as something as a main talking point. But I digress…or do I?

The other side of SKC is written into that final score against Houston - e.g., the two goals they gave up (and to Houston). They’ve given away goals all season. Differences in style notwithstanding (see the possession numbers), I’d go so far as to say they’re starting to resemble the Timbers in way both good and bad. A team that can’t keep out the opposition can only find success by out-scoring them; both Portland and Kansas City have the weapons to pull that off (player availability assumed), so this one boiled down to the question of who could pull it off on the night. Sure, Sporting pinned in Portland several times last night, but one Timber or another managed to get in the way (see the balance of blocked shots), whereas KC let Dairon Asprilla (get well!) have two cracks at scoring the opener. Portland’s defense wasn’t flawless - they got caught in one of their patented “can’t clear the danger” spin cycles in giving up the opening goal - but they held firmer over the full 90 than SKC and that was enough.

MLS Off-Season Weekly (12/14/19): Playa Moves, Painful Realities, and an Amendment

Amended, but neither forgotten nor invalidated.

On the theory it makes some kind of sense, I’m going to start this week’s review with the league-wide news before covering the latest on the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati…

…which also relates to the reality neither of them have made much news. And, for the same reason, this will be my last soccer post of 2019. I mean, why dry-heave out content (like this guy) when the world fails to provide? I’ll be back in 2020, like one of those plants you start to dump beer on, half hoping it’ll die, so you don’t have to deal with it. (Hat-tip to a long-time friend of mine, who once had a plant named “Worf” that, as he put it “thrived on neglect.” For the record, he did not, to my knowledge, ever water Worf with beer.) So, come along for this quick round-up of news from all ‘round Major League Soccer, starting with playa moves.

Playa Moves
As a public service, I want to start by directing people to one of The Mothership’s (aka, MLSSoccer.com) better off-season features: the one-stop transfer/needs tracker, which gives little thumbnails on every team in the league till they start kicking things again. It keeps a bird’s-eye view on comings and goings, but without reinventing the wheel every week (like some kind of dumbass). And, honestly, a good chunk of what’s happening right now aren’t really “moves” – e.g., DC United buying three more years of Bill Hamid, or even Atlanta United FC making Emerson Hyndman’s States-side return official – but they still count as both smart and good actions, even if they just reassert the Status Quo Ante First Kick 2020. That said, some are more interesting than others. For instance…

So…Michael Bradley, Huh?

Sometimes, details from a story gets stuck in your head, and it muddies something that comes later – e.g., that thing about Bradley’s option automatically renewing at $6.5 million per in the event he lead Toronto FC to victory last season. As such, when I read that TFC re-signed Bradley, my first thought was, “for $6.5 million, are you fucking stupid?” (Even my inner voice is an incredible potty-mouth.) They aren’t, of course. While full terms were (annoyingly) not disclosed, Toronto burned some TAM to keep Bradley around and freed up a DP spot in the same move – i.e., reportedly the same template the Portland Timbers will use to hold onto Diego Valeri. Full disclosure, I’m weird on Bradley, in that I see him as valuable and overrated in the same glance – to apply brute logic to the question, could Toronto find a better player for his position (my answer: yes) - but, I also believe that a team can hold a player for multiple reasons.