Sporting KC lacks typical finishing touch. Why is the magic so elusive this season?

Sporting Kansas City’s offense was the envy of the league last season. Daniel Salloi, Johnny Russell and Alan Pulido gave the team a finishing touch that opponents found difficult to counter.

The goals that trio was able to create helped cover Sporting KC’s defensive mistakes. In turn, members of the defense played with more confidence and aggression, knowing their counterparts up front had them covered. Concede a goal? Don’t worry ... one of those front three would get Sporting back in it.

Sure enough, Sporting last season earned 19 points from games in which they’d fallen behind at some point.

Flash back to the present and Sporting KC is dropping those points, losing games they’ve led at one point or another. The goals aren’t coming to cover their mistakes.

This season, at 2-6-0 entering Saturday night’s 7:30 home game against the Columbus Crew, Sporting KC is off to its worst start since 2011, when the record through eight games was 1-6-1.

Asked about his team’s inability to score more than one goal in a match so far in 2022, Sporting KC manager Peter Vermes was short and to the point.

“One goal should be enough,” he retorted.

But Vermes’ philosophy has never been to bunker in and counter in search of narrow wins. So what, exactly, does he mean? In both of Sporting’s most recent matches, Vermes’ side was playing well and leading 1-0 before things fell apart.

“Our mentality on defending and playing every roll of the ball is just, it’s just not there,” he said, “and it has to be better.”

He’s essentially saying We need the mentality to grind out a 1-0 win. And he’s right. A mentality like that means you’re focused on every single play and doing whatever is necessary to keep the ball out of the net.

As in baseball, the margin for error in a closely contested soccer match is razor-thin. When a pitcher is working with a narrow lead, any mistake he makes with a pitch can completely change the course of the game.

The same could be said for Sporting. Mistakes have been devastating.

As noted at the top, Sporting KC in recent seasons became known as a club with a potent attack. Unraveling what’s happened to that attack tells another part of their present-day story.

The injury-fueled absences of Mexican star Pulido and fellow designated player Gadi Kinda have hurt. Salloi and Russell have been double-digit goal scorers without them before, but so far this season, both have scored just one goal apiece.

“People gotta step up — I do, too, to win games,” Salloi said. “At the end of the day, somebody has to do some magic at the end and win the game. That’s all we need, a little bit more magic.”

Call it magic, call it creativity, it hasn’t been there very often this season. Fans saw a momentarily flash against Nashville, but it took Sporting conceding two poor goals to get there.

In that April 9 match at Children’s Mercy Park, Vermes brought on Nikola Vujnovic and Marinos Tzionis to play centrally — Vujnovic as a striker and Tzionis as more of a shadow striker than a true attacking midfielder. The ploy nearly worked. Sporting created some of its best and most creative attacking play of the season.

In hopes of replicating that relative sucess, albeit with a more defensive-minded presence behind Tzionis, Vermes on Sunday switched up Sporting’s formation up for a third time, effectively going with a 4-2-3-1: two defensive midfielders behind a “free role” No. 10, in Tzionis.

That arrangement worked for the first 70 minutes at LAFC, but it wasn’t enough for Sporting to bring home a positive result.

And Salloi believes there’s still plenty more that he and his teammates can do individually to help the team get back to its winning ways.

“We need to be more willing to create chances, do more one-on-ones, combinations, more actions,” he said. “Because at the end of the day, that’s where you have to win the game. You have to do much more up top, and I think it has not been good enough.”

This story was originally published April 21, 2022 at 11:02 AM with the headline "Sporting KC lacks typical finishing touch. Why is the magic so elusive this season?."