Sporting KC vs Inter Miami Postscript - On Being Overcome

What a night it was back at Arrowhead

I never do the 'surrender cobra' thing. I grew up a self-conscious kid during the era of the snarky sports blogsites like SB Nation and Deadspin, which made a habit of screen-shotting the mosaics of stunned home fans putting their hands to their heads in disbelief after suffering some shock misfortune. I was mortified of accidentally becoming the kid at the Michigan/Michigan State game in 2015, and even after the worst moments I've seen, I keep myself lucid enough to avoid making that pose.

After Miami's second goal, a loping curler from Lionel Messi that, for a moment, looked to be heading into the Arrowhead Stadium stands before dipping just under the crossbar, I felt my hair poking through my fingers and my eyes straining at their sockets. Years of anxious training against absentmindedly assuming a pose worthy of ridicule were no match for what played out in front of me.

I succumbed completely to the moment on Saturday. Every undercurrent beneath the match flowed through me at points forcefully enough to drown out the kvetching and bitterness that the cynical part of my brain wanted acknowledged. In the moment, I saw Arrowhead not as an oversized venue chosen to kowtow to neutrals but as the place where I learned to love the sport, where I first knew this club. I felt the spectacle as not overly-corporate and plasticine but as a joyous, carnivalistic event. I saw the star of the evening not as annoyingly-hyped and advertised but as the genuine article of peak footballing genius and artistry. I took the match itself as not the infuriating display of ineptitude from a team on a troublingly unstable path but as a high-quality match of which my team came out on the losing end.

I should have been upset about the club moving this match to Arrowhead. The easiest reading to make on it is a cynical one - The club had chosen to move the match from our normal stadium to a larger stadium for the sake of placating and selling tickets to likely neutral if not antagonistic fans. It was not a move made necessarily for the benefit of Sporting fans, but for the benefit of people chasing a chance to see a player on the opposing team. 

For as much of a cash-grab as this might've been, I was grateful to go back to Arrowhead for soccer once more. Arrowhead was where it all started for me. In the summer of 2006, one of the assistant coaches on my rec-league soccer team took us to a Wizards/Columbus Crew match. I didn't yet know to recognize the swathes of empty seats as embarrassing, the play on the field as low-quality, or the lack of permanent Wizards iconography as indicative of an unsustainable tenancy. The Wizards were our team, and Arrowhead was where they played.

My dad bought two season tickets in 2007. That year, among paltry crowds of a couple-thousand at best, I learned the sport and the league in which it was played. I learned about offside, penalty shouts, dives, and howlers. I had a few glimpses of beauty from players soon to depart our shores for better opportunities elsewhere. I saw players mononymous to MLS but anonymous to the exterior world - Shalrie, Jaime, and DeRo, among others. I also learned why Dallas opted for "FC" over "Burn", why New York took the name of an energy drink, and how to pronounce "Real". Our games featured a big funny green dragon who rode an ATV around the ground, Homer Simpson "D'oh" sound effects when opponents scuffed shots, a minute during which a Wizards goal would earn fans a free pizza, and occasionally, some tremendously exciting soccer action. It was where I first felt the primal urge to stand up when forward beat a defender en route to goal, first clapped along with the drums in the supporter's section, and first learned to love club heroes like Jimmy Conrad, Eddie Johnson, and Davy Arnaud. That season at Arrowhead, flawed as it was, set in motion a love for the sport that I still carry, and I carried it closely into the goal end at Arrowhead last weekend.

The evening was tinged with a spectacular quality absent during those old days. Everybody seemed abuzz, even when faced with lines and long walks to get into the stadium, the atmosphere was lively. Events with so many in attendance from opposing fan bases typically carry an edge of antagonism, but I didn't feel any of that. There was a lot of mixed-company; I saw families with one kid in pink and one in blue, friend groups split between SKC and Miami jerseys, one kid in a Ronaldo jersey, one kid in an LA Galaxy Beckham jersey, and the odd Rapids and St. Louis City jersey here and there as well. 

I was taken by how much of a pro-Sporting crowd it felt from my vantage point, though. When we started the call-and-response "SPORTING / KC'' chant in the Cauldron, we were met with a thundering response from the rest of the stadium, one produced by a group larger than Children's Mercy Park could hold. I had honestly expected a worse ratio.

I don't know the mindset nor makeup of the rest of the crowd, but I know that soccer fandom in this country is multitudinal. One may have their local team in MLS, NWSL, USL, NISA, NPSL, the NCAA, or elsewhere, and you may divide interest between a cross-section of each (I assume I'm the only one split between Sporting/Current/Wave/Orange County in the bunch). Then you may have your team external to the country, which may be that of your parents and grandparents, or may be the one whose logo you liked as a kid, or the one who was always playing on TV when you were growing up. You may have your favorite individual player as well. I'm sure there were people there who grew up going to see their local team, be that in KC, or any of the many places whose license plates I saw represented in the parking lot– Arkansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Iowa– and marveled at Messi's play in the World Cup or Champions League from afar. I’m sure for many, this was an opportunity to see a hero they never thought they'd get the chance to see perform in America, which is something that I understand, even if it wasn’t what drew me here.

This is not my story - I don't count myself among his many individual fans, the ones who followed him from Barcelona to Paris to Miami. I've never owned a jersey of his, I'd neve made it a point to watch one of his matches for the sake of seeing him specifically until the Leagues Cup last year. Messi is an all-time-great player to me, one who I wanted to see play as much as I'd wanted to see many of the greats who have faced off against Sporting KC in the past, but this was not a near-religious pilgrimage to see a personal hero of mine as it was for others. This was a chance to see my team play against one of the best ever to do it.

He lived up to that description on Saturday. The two goals to which he contributed left me astounded. In the first half, he flicked a skipping little ground pass out into the box, one which turned from an errant mistake certain to roll out for a goal kick into a perfectly-placed set-up for Diego Gomez on a cutting run past our center backs in the span of a second. He and Gomez had galvanized chaos into perfection in a fashion I've rarely seen before in years of attending sporting events. There are moments in which a player seems to be seeing their craft on a plane different not just from those opposing them, but to those in the stands as well. 

I can't describe it in a way that fits. All I can grasp at is the feeling I got when I lived in Quebec, picking up bits and pieces of French sentences spoken to me in a panicked rush, my comprehension a step behind the speaker, getting the thrust of everything just a beat too slowly, their point fully finished to them while still unintelligible to me. That would've been enough, but his goal in the second half was even greater.

I have been privileged to be in the stadium to see some of the best go to work. Though I haven’t seen as many as others, I have seen MVPs, future hall-of-famers, and all-time greats without the barrier of a screen between us. I saw Ohtani in his first season in the majors, I saw Embiid and Mahomes as developing college players, Davies and Butler as young early-career professionals, Rapinoe, Trout, and Ichiro in their primes, plus Donovan, Sorenstam, and Cuauhtemoc after theirs. I remember the up-and-comers through flashes in which the quality they’d grow to refine shined through. I remember the greats in their primes through the way their quality imposed itself upon me throughout the entirety of their games. 

Those great players nearing the end of their careers, though, they prompt me to put effort into paying attention. When one event will likely be the last time, or only time, that I see them perform, I can’t allow myself to miss anything. This was the case with Messi on Saturday. There were moments in which he looked truly mortal, in which he misplayed passes, arrived late to duels, and missed free-kicks off-frame, but there was always a shared focus in the crowd whenever he had the ball at his feet. The din of the conversations happening outside of our section would quiet at first, then after a few touches, a murmur would grow up out of the silence. People would rise to their feet. More often than not, the moment fizzled with a pass away or a missed shot, but the potential was always felt and always present. 

The moment had little time to build for the goal in the 51st. There was a pass intercepted by Busquets, a pass back to Ruiz, and another forward to Messi past the lunging leg of Felipe Hernandez. Messi took a single touch forward and struck the ball with his left, arcing it over Tim Melia into the top-right corner. The ball was in the net before I even had the chance to register what I was seeing. I stood, hands to head, in a pose that would’ve been fodder for memetic diffusion had any camera been aimed so far back into the stands to see it, for a good ten seconds. I looked at Mike, who shook his head and shrugged. I looked to my dad, who did about the same. The goal fit the moment, it made that sensation of drowning in the spectacle of the evening feel sensible. That goal alone would’ve been worth the price of admission for a neutral fan and, even though it came against my team, I felt fortunate to have seen it. 

I have no idea how many of those neutral fans came into the match knowing much of Sporting KC at all, let alone of the quality of Erik Thommy, but they learned about him on Saturday night just as well. His first was a well-placed shot across the goal from inside the box, capitalizing on the time and space that Nicolas Freire gave him to patiently pick a spot and aim. His second, coming only seven minutes after Messi’s, was another one of the best I’ve ever seen. The ball had ricocheted high into the air off a corner, high enough that I had time not just to identify Thommy’s run-up but also to ask if he’d be daring enough to go for goal at that moment. As soon as the question ran through my mind, he’d made perfect contact off the volley, rocketed the ball past Julian Gressel, off the post, and into the net. 

I didn’t believe it’d gone in at first. I thought it’d hit the stanchion behind the goal and rippled the net from behind. I sighed in disappointment, bemoaning the miss but appreciating the gumption it took for Thommy to try in the first place. It wasn’t until I saw Thommy doing his bow-and-arrow celebration, galloping towards the stands with his team chasing him that I figured out what had happened. I had to wait until the scoreboard changed to really believe it. It didn’t seem real. One of the best goals I’ve ever witnessed had been followed up with another within a span of ten minutes. 

This was a phenomenal night of soccer in Kansas City, and I wish it had been a better night for our team. The game was basically decided off of a few poor clearances in the second half, again displaying this team’s defensive woes late in matches. Points were dropped in this match the same way that they were in the Portland and Galaxy matches. This team is too thin defensively, they tire out in the second half, and Vermes doesn’t trust his bench enough to sub anybody in. They make crucial mistakes when they most need to be disciplined, and it leads to goals. It’s the same problem rearing its head over and over, and it seems like a fundamental personnel issue more so than something that can be fixed within the unit as it stands. The club’s been quite good with mid-season signings in the past few years, and they’ll have looser restrictions on signings with the roster construction rule changes coming from the league, so I think there’s a good chance that this problem can be stemmed to some extent over the course of this year. I’m doubtful that it’ll be resolved before then, though.

This should have left me furious. I should’ve been muttering and fidgeting in ire around the Arrowhead Stadium concourse after the match’s completion. It’s not just that there’s a problem, as there are always problems, but our coach seems disinterested in even trying to solve this one. There are no proactive subs and there are few attempts made to get bench defenders match time. This will repeat and repeat and repeat. In the moment, I just didn’t feel like that. In the moment, I walked out to the concourse, shaking my head in disbelief, appreciation for the night, for the spectacle, for the match overtaking my frustration for the moment, leaving it to fester until I wrote this paragraph. 

I say with a bit of embarrassment that I left Saturday evening enchanted. Perhaps I should have sneered at the glitz of the night. Perhaps I should have felt betrayed by the club for moving the match. Perhaps I should have been apoplectic about another disappointment at home. However I am grateful that I can still feel enchanted by sports like that. 

I will save my acrid cynicism for when we drop a lead to St. Louis this Saturday.