Match Day 11: Who Needs Center Backs?

Sporting Kansas City continue their busy stretch of games tomorrow when they'll take on the Chicago Fire at Toyota Park. KC will be playing their third game in a little over the week, and will be doing so short handed with injuries and call ups playing their role in leaving KC short handed.

The Chicago Fire come into tomorrow's game having picked up their first win of the season last week in New York as they defeated the Red Bulls 5-4 thanks to a hattrick from Harry Shipp. The Fire used a 15 minute time frame in the second half to score four of those five goals. They'll now return home looking to pick up their first home win of the season. Their forwards, Quincy Amarikwa and Mike Magee have to be licking their chops a little bit ahead of tomorrow's game. Amarikwa leads the Fire in scoring at this time with five goals, while Magee led them in scoring last season and has two goals this year.

KC's current center back issues have been well documented. Matt Besler and Lawrence Olum are away on national team duty while Aurelien Collin and Ike Opara are both out with injury. Even KC's lone "healthy" center back, Erik Palmer-Brown is still listed as being questionable for tomorrow. And one of the other players likely to fill in, Oriol Rosell is also questionable. Peter Vermes said that Rosell would be a game time decision tomorrow. But I expect that Rosell will be able to go tomorrow and his likely partner won't be Palmer-Brown, but instead is likely to be Chance Myers. At the other end of the field, KC needs to replace Graham Zusi. On the road I think that Jacob Peterson is the likely replacement. Part of that is his defensive abilities, which will help out with a patch work defense.

Kronberg

Juliao - Myers - Rosell - Sinovic

Nagamura - Feilhaber

Martinez

Peterson - Dwyer - Zizzo

Number to Remember - 5 and 6 - Who at the beginning of the season thought that we'd be seeing KC's 5th and 6th string center backs starting the same game for Kansas City?

Key Match Up - KC's CBs vs Amarikwa and Magee - This whole situation is a little scary for KC. Without their top four central defenders the match up to watch will be how KC's center backs cope with the Chicago forward line.

PREDICTION - This game is quite scary, KC has some tired legs with their third game in a little over a week. Things don't get easier with games against Toronto and New York coming up, so getting a result here is important, especially after the points lost against Philadelphia on Wednesday. But with a make shift back line, it's going to be hard for KC to pull it off. In a place that KC doesn't normally play well, like Chicago, I'm just not sure that KC gets the job down tomorrow.

SKC - 1 (Dwyer)
CHI - 2 (Magee, Shipp)