Despite a tough stoppage-time loss in a chippy rivalry match, Peter Vermes won't leave Utah feeling his club should have picked up a road point and extended their unbeaten streak to eight matches.
They didn't play well enough to earn that, Sporting Kansas City's manager said.
“I don't necessarily know if we deserved a point 1023666890" tabindex="0">tonight,” Vermes told reporters in a conference call after 1023666891" tabindex="0">Sunday night's 2-1 away loss to Real Salt Lake, “with the aggressiveness that they had going to our goal, with the amount of saves Tim [Melia] had to come up with to keep us in the game.”
Melia made four saves in the match, including a quick-reaction stop of Devon Sandoval's header in the second minute of stoppage time, but just missed getting to Olmes Garcia's shot a minute later after the ball deflected off center back Kevin Ellis' foot and looped inside the far post.
That spoiled Sporting's hope for a result after falling behind 1-0 on Sebastian Jaime's set-piece header in the 15th minute, but equalizing on the half hour after Dom Dwyer finished a perfectly weighted through ball from Benny Feilhaber.
It was Feilhaber's eighth assist of the year, a new career high just 15 matches into the season, and Dwyer's fifth goal of 2015 after a slow start.
But with RSL winning 16 corners to just four for his club, Vermes wasn't happy with Sporting's job of shutting down their defensive third as Melia took his first loss in seven matches as a starter.
“I think we gave them way too many corner kicks, which shows they were pretty aggressive in and around our box,” he said. “And we just made a lot of stupid choices, when we gave them too many corners. So as much as we got ourselves into the game, I thought we weren't as good. We weren't as good.”
Javier Morales, who delivered the assist on Garcia's late match-winner, was already on a yellow card – one of seven in the match, five for the hosts – when he took down Feilhaber from behind in the 49th minute. Vermes would not say whether he thought the foul merited a second yellow from referee Drew Fischer and a sending-off, though.
While he has not been shy about calling out officials in the past, on Sunday night Vermes saved all of his criticisms for his own club.
“It wasn't lack of intensity,” Vermes said. “We didn't match their intensity. They were hungrier than we were.”
Steve Brisendine covers Sporting Kansas City for MLSsoccer.com.
