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At the risk of sounding like the obscure high school classmate that you have the misfortune of bumping into at Kroger biannually, hello there. How’ve you been? It’s been quite a while.
I’ve been wanting to get back into this whole writing about Lou City thing, and the day of a match against an underperforming Western conference expansion team seems a sufficiently arbitrary point to jump back into it. Quite a lot's happened since I last wrote one of these, but I'll try to keep the discussion to the relatively recent and Louisville City-related, since I don't think this is the best vehicle to talk about the end of the 2021 season, or say, a war in Europe.
Our last match notwithstanding, it’s fair to say the start to this season has been just about excellent. The emergence of Wilson Harris as the league’s joint-top scorer has been instrumental to our strong start, and quickly put to rest any fears of where the goals might come from after Cam Lancaster’s preseason injury.
Equally impressive has been Kyle Morton, who’s seven clean sheets and 83% save percentage put him first and second in the league in those respective categories, and his off-the-woodwork save against Indy was a work of art.
Joshua Wynder continues to establish himself as a standout youngster and has formed a solid partnership with Totsch at the back, and Niall McCabe’s 3 goals in 6 games show that the veteran is still very capable of playing in midfield (and also producing bangers from a dead ball).
Other worthy mentions are Perez, Dia, Ownby and Bone, but while there have been instances of missteps, pretty much the entire squad has performed well.
Despite these performances, it’s reasonable to say that our loss to LA Galaxy II might have been somewhat overdue. Two Open Cup matches that went all the way to penalties would take a toll on any squad with a packed fixture list, even one as deep and experienced as ours. Between those and a few nervy draws– particularly away to Charleston and our 0-0 holdout against Birmingham following Matsoso’s sending off– there was a feeling that we’d been riding our luck a little bit, even if still largely deserving of the vast majority of our point tally. Really it feels like the loss was down to a different cast of players rather than underperformance, especially considering the near full rotation of the starting eleven. While Parker Siegfried has proven to be a competent keeper for us last season, it’s clear Morton’s presence was missed in goal, and our understudy backline didn’t look equipped to handle LA’s counterattacking threat. While it’s disappointing to end the streak, I don’t see this result as any cause for concern, although the top of the Eastern conference is looking pretty tight so you don’t want to drop any points. Here’s to hoping we’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming tonight.
As for future posts on the blog, I think I’m going to take a light-touch approach, just writing as I feel inclined rather than regularly. I think like a lot of us, my eyes are looking ahead to our Open Cup fixture at Lynn Family against an old foe in Nashville, so I’m probably be back with something around then. Until then, take it easy and let’s hope to right the ship against Monterey Bay tonight.