Sporting Kansas City opened the 2015 season with a loss in their first preseason game, 2-0 to the Portland Timbers.
Sporting kicked off without a number of players, beside Matt Besler and Jon Kempin who are still with the US national team, Roger Espinoza, Chance Myers, Ike Opara, Saad Abdul-Salaam, and Graham Zusi all sat out the game for Kansas City. While the game was the standard two 45 minute halves, Kansas City made numerous changes at both the 30 minute and 60 minute mark giving pretty much everyone 30 minutes.
KC suffered an injury blow in just the 15th minute as Seth Sinovic caught an elbow from Fanendo Adi. Sinovic went down and was subbed out for Amadou Dia, and ended up having to get stitches for a cut he received. Portland opened the scoring from the spot in the 30th minute through Gaston Fernandez. After a block and a good save by goalkeeper Luis Marin, a handball in the box led to a Portland penalty. Fernandez fired the penalty right up the middle giving Portland the lead. Immediately after KC made their first set of changes.
Portland didn't make any changes at the 30 minute mark, instead waiting until half time. Sporting's second set of players didn't concede. Early in the second half though it was the Timbers that doubled their lead as Michael Nanchoff hit a nice free kick from just outside the box that beat Tim Melia, hit off the post and in. Throughout the game, Sporting really didn't create much in the way of dangerous chances on goal. But other than those two goals, Portland also struggled to create chances. Overall, it looked like two teams playing their first preseason game.
There were also four new trialists in the game for Kansas City. Along with the unsigned draft picks, Dia, James Rogers, and Tony Rocha, Sporting academy product, Felipe Hernandez, and former Sporting player, Christian Duke, Kansas Cit also had Brent Griffiths, who started the game at center back and played 60 minutes for Kansas City, Alex Dixon, Santiago Otero, and Daniel Rodriguez. Griffiths has spent his entire career in the A-League in Australia, playing with a number of teams there. Dixon is a former Houston Dynamo home grown player, Otero is an Argentine who last played with Godoy Cruz, and Rodriguez, I'm unable to find anything to confirm where he'd previously played.
Saturday, January 31, 2015
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1 comment:
impressed by griffiths, i hope we sign him. he did well even though sinovic went out early and portland was attacking that side. disappointment by nemeth, bad give away led to the first goal, but even besides that, he seemed to be struggling with the field conditions and letting it get into his head and pouting about it. something bad will inevitably happen when a player is in that mind set.
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