Sporting KC: Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant
Sporting KC dismantled Toluca 3-0 on Thursday night in the CCL. It was a truly fabulous performance, one of the best I have seen from an MLS team. Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant.
There is a reason football is the most celebrated and popular sport in the world. Watched across every corner of the globe, fantasised by every nation, there isn’t a sport that has spanned boundaries and cultures and people and populations like football.
That’s because it is beautiful to watch. While the arch of a deep ball that drops in the bucket has a sensual sweep to it, or the crack of baseball bat to ball is a satisfying sound, snapping you in and out of a dream, there isn’t anything quite like watching a football team carve through an opponent, the ball fizzing from player to player, the net rippling with aesthetic beauty, the ball following those curved trajectories with such accuracy and panache.
Football is the beautiful game. That is why it has travelled the world and back again. And when played at its best, there are few games that are more poetic in its execution.
On Thursday night, in the opening encounter of their CONCACAF Champions League exploits, Sporting Kansas City reached this epiphanerial brilliance. And oh, how it was so brilliant to behold.
This was football played at its most glorious. The ball did all the work, zipping across the ground with joy at the cleanliness by which it had just been struck. The combination play was neat, confined, precise. The movement off the ball almost like a synchronised dance, choreographed and rehearsed over and over again, only this was a jazz piece with that unpredictable improvisation laced throughout.
For Peter Vermes, this must just have been like heaven, to sit back, relax, and watch his team carve through their opposition time and time again. In the end, the 3-0 scoreline was kind to Mexicans Toluca. This could have been far more emphatic, such was the sheer excellence of Sporting’s play.
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There were tactical elements to their victory, also. Vermes shifted into a 3-4-3 with the ball, providing space for both Graham Zusi and Matt Besler to pick out long-range passes from deep as the wide centre-backs. The first goal would come from a lovely, arched Besler ball, looping perfectly into Gerso Fernandes’ path.
The midfield rotation of Ilie Sanchez, Roger Espinoza and Felipe Gutierrez was designed and deadly. Ilie, the most defensive of the trio, would score the third and final coffin nail-hammering goal, sweetly caressing an 18-yard volley into the top corner, with the ball kissing the crossbar just for the aesthetic effect that Sporting KC painted with every stroke throughout.
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The brilliance was not random. This was orchestrated, fine-tuned, honed, designed. This was a crafted football, executed to the highest standard. And it was simply brilliant to behold. Sporting KC, you really were phenomenal.