Sporting KC drops Major League Soccer opener to Atlanta United. Home opener is Saturday
Atlanta United two first-half goals Sunday afternoon as Sporting Kansas City lost its season opener 3-1 at Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
Sporting KC coach Peter Vermes told reporters during the week leading up to the game that it would be a fast match, and it was. Neither team could string together more than five passes in the opening 15 minutes. They pressed each other hard and delivered challenges with matching pace and power.
But with that much pressure, little mistakes led to big consequences.
All it took was Sporting’s Uri Rosell misplaying a simple pass to Remi Walter in the 19th minute and Atlanta was off to the races. Two passes later, Luiz Araújo chipped a finish over goalkeeper Tim Melia.
“We gave the ball away in a really bad spot on the field, which then in turn, our team’s open at that moment,” Vermes said. “That was difficult just because there wasn’t any buildup from them. It was a big mistake by us in the way we were losing the ball in a certain place on the field.”
Sporting came back to life around the 30th minute, finding some rhythm and pinning Atlanta under a barrage of corner kicks and dangerous service. After one particularly close goalmouth scramble, the hosts were left with their hands on their heads.
It looked like Sporting might well get it to 1-1 before halftime, but then an old friend showed up. Dom Dwyer, who’d been on a preseason trial with Atlanta and signed a two year contract just last week, subbed on for an injured Araújo and made his former team pay right away.
Sporting’s first-round MLS Draft pick from 2012, Dwyer received a long ball that isolated him one-on-one with Andreu Fontas. Fontas lost the battle, and Dwyer ripped a shot past a helpless Melia.
“There’s going to be moments in games where we lose balls, where we make mistakes,” Melia said. “But I think our shape and our positioning, how open we were, it hurt us. It allowed them to constantly be on the counter-attack, where we’re in these situations where we’re one-v-one defending with no help within 30 yards.”
Sporting KC just couldn’t get its attack going in the second half. Despite controlling the majority of possession and registering 13 shots, they could put only two on target.
The cohesiveness and trademark ball movement of Sporting’s buildup was absent as well. Call it early-season rust, or something else, but Daniel Salloi noticed it, too.
“It’s not clicking yet,” said Salloi, who scored an opening day goal for the second straight year. “I’d rather have these early on in the season and then our team clicks after a couple of games and has that rhythm.
“I know it’s gonna come. It always comes with this team.”
Salloi scored his goal off a corner kick in the 85th minute to give Sporting KC some life, but it was too little, too late. As Sporting was throwing numbers forward, 17-year-old Caleb Wiley finished a pacey Atlanta counter-attack for his first MLS goal.
Sporting KC’s next game is Saturday, the club’s 2:30 p.m. home opener against the Houston Dynamo at Children’s Mercy Park in Kansas City, Kan.
This story was originally published February 27, 2022 at 4:00 PM with the headline "Sporting KC drops Major League Soccer opener to Atlanta United. Home opener is Saturday."