The good news, bad news and good news of Sporting KC’s Saturday defeat
The good news: Sporting Park has set three attendance records in as many games hosted at the Kansas City, Kansas, soccer stadium. Sporting Kansas City’s game Saturday, in which they hosted the New York Red Bulls, managed to outdraw last Wednesday’s Major League All-Star Game with 21,304 in the stands during a humid afternoon game. The All-Star Game had broken a previous record-high attendance figure from the previous SKC home game against Toronto FC.
The bad news: Nearly all those from that record crowd went home disappointed following a 3-2 victory by the visiting Red Bulls. Sporting Kansas City put out its best defensive lineup (Seth Sinovic, Aurelien Collin, Matt Besler and Chance Myers), but it didn’t show on Saturday. New York, which spent most of the game seemingly comfortable allowing SKC to control the run of play, made the most of its few opportunities to slip past the uncharacteristically porous SKC defense and fire three pretty easy goals past goalkeeper Jimmy Nielsen.
