KANSAS CITY, Mo. – It wasn't so long ago that Benny Feilhaber sat in a roomful of reporters and discussed the increased defensive duties he'd been asked to take on.
Sporting Kansas City had new faces all over the pitch, manager Peter Vermes was experimenting with formation changes, and Sporting's best playmaker was spending a good chunk of time focusing on blowing up opposing attacks.
Obviously, a few things have changed since then.
Feilhaber has been moved well up the pitch in recent matches, and to immediate effect. Going into Saturday's away match against the Houston Dynamo (8:30 pm ET; MLS LIVE), he has an MLS-best five assists through seven matches, just two short of his career high, with nearly 80 percent of the season remaining.
So, barring a disaster, is this the year that his assist total not only matches, but easily surpasses, the No. 10 on his shirt?
Feilhaber just smiled at the question, posed on Thursday during the club's weekly news conference: “If you ask me right now, yeah, I definitely want to get more than five assists from here on out.”
He'd also like to see a career high in goals this year (four is his best in one season), in part to help relieve the defensive pressure on center forward Dom Dwyer, but has yet to open his account in that column.
His teammates aren't complaining, though – not with the assist numbers Feilhaber has racked up in the early going.
“He's realized that he's an important player for us, so when he's playing his best, we're at our best as a team,” center back and captain Matt Besler told MLSsoccer.com earlier this week. “I think he's been challenged at times by various people and by himself to be more consistent, and for the most part he's done very well this year with that consistency. He's been one of our most consistent players, and also I think you're starting to see production.
“It's one thing to play well, but in his position, that attacking role, it's another thing to get assists, get goals, create chances. He's done that this year, very well, and it's helped us a lot.”
And, Vermes said, Feilhaber – who has played in the Bundesliga with Hamburger SV, the Premier League with Derby County and the 2010 World Cup with the United States – is playing the best ball of his career at age 30 and still hasn't shown all he can do yet.
“Benny has the ability to be one of the best No. 10s in our league,” Vermes said earlier in Thursday's news conference. “When he's in form, like he is now, playing on both sides of the ball, a lot of things tend to come out that are part of his makeup. That will only get better if he continues to value those things that are important, and I think that's one of those reasons why he's in form at the moment.
In one sense, the change was simple – a mere matter of pitch position.
“I'm just trying to get closer to the goal,” Feilhaber said. “I think that's one of the things that I've consciously tried to improve in my game, get closer to the goal and be able to provide not only assists but get goals myself. That hasn't come yet, but hopefully it will. That's something that Peter wants me to create, and I can't do that from too far away from the goal, so I'm trying to make my runs further up the field so I can connect with Dom and the other offensive players and just get in more dangerous areas.”
Sounds easy enough, especially as Feilhaber has long felt more comfortable in the attack than on the other side of the ball.
“It's a position that I've played pretty much my whole life,” he said. “If you ask me how I think, I definitely think I'm more of an offensive – I have more of an offensive mind than a defensive one. And so it comes more naturally to me to be in those positions to kind of try and create opportunities for our team.”
But there have been other hurdles to clear for Feilhaber since he arrived before the 2013 season in a trade with the New England Revolution – where he'd just spent what he has called the most frustrating season of his career, with one goal and two assists.
“For me, I think, it was a process,” he said. And it's been a little each time, I guess. When I first came here, the No. 1 thing that was the toughest to get right was the amount of fitness that was required to do most of the things that Peter wants from his midfielders. So that took a while, obviously. … It wasn't easy for me.
“And then each and every year, there seems to be something that Pete wants – for me, for sure, but I think for each and every player to kind of improve in their game. So this year, one of the things that he's asked me to do is to be, I guess, a little more aware of my value on the offensive side of the ball.”
“Asked,” where Vermes is concerned, usually means “told.” Sporting's manager is the old-school, tough-love sort when it comes to making his expectations known. And the more he sees in a player, the tougher he is.
He saw plenty in Feilhaber – enough to deal away Sporting's first-round pick in the 2014 MLS SuperDraft, despite the midfielder's disappointing numbers the year before – and set to work getting it out of him.
“There've been a lot of guys in this club who have come through, and we've taken guys who've been perceived as not meeting their potential and then eventually getting the potential out of them,” he said. “I think a lot of that has to do with the consistency of our coaching staff, spending the time that we do with players to get the most out of them and make them understand that they're not doing it for us, they're doing it for themselves because they have potential. And a lot of times, you have to paint that picture in different ways.
“For lack of a better word, you've got to be a pain in the ass in pursuit of that, all of the time, and you can't give up. So I think that has a lot to do with it, and the other is that I think he realizes and values that stuff a lot more than maybe he used to.”
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That, in turn, has made Feilhaber a pain for opponents this season – not only on set-piece service, which has long been one of his strengths, but during the run of play as well, as he showed in last weekend's
2-1 away defeat to the Los Angeles Galaxy
.
Dwyer took the ball down the right side of the pitch, then worked it back to the middle and passed it to Feilhaber just inside the penalty area. Feilhaber one-timed it with the inside of his right foot, right into Krisztian Nemeth's path for a cool chip that equalized the match at 1-1.
“It was a good build up,” Feilhaber told reporters afterward. “Dom did really well there to hold the ball for us, and he gave me a good ball. Krisztian made a really good run and a great finish. It was a good team goal, something that is nice to see because we have been missing a little bit of that over the first few games of the year, but it is starting to come together. It was nice for our team to combine like that.”
Feilhaber's hoping to see more of that free-flowing play this weekend, despite Sporting's history against the Dynamo.
When Dominic Kinnear was Houston's manager, matches between the two rivals were usually chippy, stop-and-go affairs marked by foul after restart after foul. While that could present Feilhaber with plenty of opportunities to add to his assist total – or perhaps have a go outright on a free kick near the 18 – he's hoping things will be more open under new manager Owen Coyle.
“If you ask me, I'd say that I don't want to have 30 chances to put the ball into the box because even though when you have that opportunity, yes, you want to concentrate,” he said. “You want to put a good ball in there to give your guys a chance. But I would much rather have a game where the ball's on the ground, and we're playing it, and it's free-flowing and it's in the run of the game.
“But if that's how the game's going to go, then no doubt that I want to concentrate on those deliveries.”
Steve Brisendine covers Sporting Kansas City for MLSsoccer.com.
