Well Today was Just Wonderful Wasn't It?

So today turned out to be a fantastic day for the SKC Wizards didn't it? It was a virtual turd sundae for Sporting KC. Two loses in preseason games today to Houston and the US Under 18 team. In the Dynamo game, KC lost 3-1, falling behind 3-1 before a late consolation from Chance Myers. The first goal was an own goal by Daneil Cyrus. This was followed by Shavar Thomas giving up a penalty kick that the Dynamo converted to make it 2-0. Then Roger Espinoza picked up a red card. As it was preseason KC just replaced him with Scott Lorenz. KC fell behind 3-0 before Myers brought it back to 3-1.

In the second game with some but not all the expected "first teamers," the Wizards lost to the US under 18 team 1-0 in the second game of the day in another disappointing result. Yeah it's preseason, but losing still hurts, especially if one of those losses is to a team of kids that have only been driving for about a year. Certainly some work that the team will have to do after they return to Arizona. The team is headed back to KC for 5 days before returning to Arizona next Monday.

The cherry on top of today's turd sundae was the injury to Wizards forward, Teal Bunbury. During the game against the Dynamo, Bunbury picked up the injury as he fell to the ground after trying to hold off Dynamo defender, Andrew Hainault and hit the ground awkwardly. Word from those in attendance was that Bunbury immediately screamed after the incident. Bunbury was on the ground for 20 minutes or so before taken to the hospital for testing. The good news, if there is good news in this injury, is that Bunbury's injury will only take 2-4 weeks to recover instead of the 4-5 months it could have taken if he had broken something of if he had done nerve damage. This does rule Bunbury out for the rest of the preseason and likely rules him out for at least the season opener against Chivas USA, and potentially another couple game. Certainly news that Peter Vermes won't want to hear when he returns from Hungary where he's tending to family matters.

This does pose and interesting question for KC now at the striker position. Other people have taken a deeper look at how KC could line up with Bunbury out including lineups of Ryan Smith, Kei Kamara, and Omar Bravo, to a lineup including current trialist, Adda Djeziri depending on how Smith is recovering from his injury. Certainly there are no shortages of options right now and the CJ Sapong draft pick could be bigger for KC than most of us realized when the pick was made.