Johnny Russell: Once healthy, Sporting KC needs to ‘start putting fear back into teams’
Since the start of the 2022 Major League Soccer season, at least one Sporting Kansas City player has been missing in every game.
The number of sidelined Sporting KC starters has grown from two to six, if you account for the personnel the team took to Chicago last weekend — including its top five goal-scorers since 2020.
“When you are missing your top players up top, that can change the game in any second,” said defender Andreu Fontas. “You expect to be at least a little bit more secure.”
While they’re on their way back to fielding a more healthy front line, Sporting KC (1-3-0) still won’t have its full complement of players — minus Alan Pulido, who’s out for the season — available for a few more weeks.
And with all the injuries, a predictable lack of results has followed. Last weekend, Sporting lost 3-1 at Chicago with captain Johnny Russell, winger Daniel Salloi and striker Khiry Shelton all out with various issues.
The old adage of, It’s not how you start, but how you finish, certainly applies in MLS and often determines the outcome of a team’s season. But Sporting KC would seem to have every right to feel a bit frustrated with how this particular season has so far unfolded.
“You would think the chemistry up top would probably be a little bit better than we’ve shown,” Russell told reporters on Friday. “We’ve played together a lot, so that’s the more frustrating part — that it hasn’t really clicked as of yet.”
For manager Peter Vermes, the spate of injuries has led to a lack of consistency in who’s available for training. But the problem cuts deeper than that. When players are out, they’re not learning the things that are being implemented in those practice sessions.
And then, even when they do return, they’re playing catch-up.
“We’ve been doing that since preseason, unfortunately,” Vermes said Friday. “Every day is a little catch-up for us. ... We’ll just keep working towards getting better every day.”
Russell, Salloi and Shelton all returned to practice in some capacity this week. During a training session that was open to media Tuesday, all three were full-go. Russell called his recovery process over the past week a bit of a “modified training plan.”
Whether some of all of that trio would be able to play this weekend was a mystery on Friday. All three players were listed as questionable for Saturday’s home match against Real Salt Lake.
Still, Russell is convinced the team will be fine once everyone’s healthy. He called Sporting KC one of the best attacking teams in the league, and he doesn’t see that changing once injuries aren’t playing havoc with lineups.
“It’s obviously up to us when we’re out on the field to go and show that,” he said. “Talk is cheap. So we need to get back out there.
“We need to get back to our best, and start putting fear back into teams.”
This story was originally published March 26, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Johnny Russell: Once healthy, Sporting KC needs to ‘start putting fear back into teams’."