Tactical mistakes sink Impact in Kansas

We don’t need to tell you that the Impact’s latest result, a 7-1 loss at Children’s Mercy Park against Sporting Kansas City, is one that the first team will be looking to forget as quickly as possible – but not without analyzing what went wrong and correcting it before their upcoming game against New York City FC, next Saturday at 1pm (TVA Sports, 98,5, TSN 690).

“We need to take responsibility and think about what happened and what we didn’t do well,” said Impact head coach Rémi Garde after the game. “We gave them way too much space in the first half and we tried recovering the ball too high on the pitch, too often. We made too many individual mistakes and too many mistakes in the way we wanted to respond.”

Rémi Garde’s men looked set to head to the locker room at half-time down by just a goal, which would have given them everything to play for after the break. But the home team was relentless, notching two more goals with just minutes left in the half to take a commanding 3-0 lead.

It set the stage for what would be a very difficult second half for the Bleu-blanc-noir.

“We’d like to apologize to our supporters,” explained midfielder Saphir Taïder. “It was a bad loss and we’re the first ones concerned. Those two goals hurt, especially considering the coach warned me 10 minutes before the end of the half that we needed to stop pressing so high because we were leaving a lot of open space behind us. The message wasn’t well understood, and we ended up conceding those two goals.” 

Too much space in midfield

After using the high press successfully in its last game against Orlando, it wasn’t as effective this time around, against one of the better collective units in MLS in Sporting Kansas City.

Once Peter Vermes’ men managed to avoid that initial wave of pressure, they were able to take advantage of the spaces left by Impact players out of position to hit the Bleu-blanc-noir where it hurts.

“The key for them was our disorganization in defense,” explained midfielder Samuel Piette. “We weren’t on the same page. Certain players pressed while others didn’t. Of course, they’re a very good team as well. We tried pressuring them like we did Orlando, but Kansas is a different team. We fell into a trap and we were naive.”

“We all need to look in the mirror this week and dust this one off,” said goalkeeper Evan Bush. “The silver lining is that it’s a non-conference road game, so if you’re going to lose points, these are the ones to lose, although you certainly don’t want to lose them in this fashion.”