Sporting Kansas City’s eight-year run of consecutive postseason appearances came to an end when the club lost to Minnesota United last week, officially eliminating them from contention for the Audi 2019 MLS Cup Playoffs.
So what went wrong for the perennial Western Conference contenders and 2013 league champs? Were they too old? Too slow? Too prone to conceding late goals?
For longtime manager and sporting director Peter Vermes, their lack of clinical finishing was a crippling shortcoming.
“We’ve had incredibly high-quality chances but we’re just not putting them in the net,” Vermes told the Blue Testament’s Thad Bell in an in-depth conversation last week, in which he detailed the multiple breakdowns that have left his team near the bottom of both the conference and overall league standings.
“The coaching staff has done a great job of getting them to go from our goal all the way up to the other team’s goal. The problem is they can’t shoot, the coaching staff can’t shoot on goal.”
Sharing a range of data points, observations and perspectives on his team’s nightmare campaign – which started so promisingly with their deep run in Concacaf Champions League – Vermes drops a number of head-turning quotes in the interview, from the statement that “too many times we have broken [mentally]” to his belief that “there has to be some other players brought in here” to elevate the quality of the squad at his disposal.
