After three consecutive victories at the start of the campaign, Sporting Kansas City suffered their first defeat of the season during the weekend against Real Salt Lake. The team is hoping to move to the top of the table if results went on their way.

Fortunately, FC Dallas were unable to take three points from their match and Sporting trail the western conference leaders by just one point after the weekend’s results. Peter Vermes was surprised to see his team fail to open the scoring despite dominating from start to finish. The team had a whopping nine shots on target but they had to wait until the injury time to open the scoring.

Even then, they did require a penalty from Feilhaber to provide a goal that was just a consolation. Glad had given the away team an early lead within the half an hour mark. Mulholland’s goal just 11 minutes before the end of normal time provided to be decisive. Sporting’s heads seemed to drop just as the goal went in. Vermes sarcastically praised the opposition for breaking up the home team’s play. He then criticised referee Ted Unkel for not being aware of the away team’s time wasting and breaking up tactics.

Sporting will have to put this loss behind them soon. They will be hoping to make use of their game in hand over Dallas to top the table. “I think what happens is that we knew going into this game that they were going to slow the game down. We have to be able to do something to counter that and we didn’t do a good enough job on our end. We played at their tempo and we made it easy for them for the majority of the game. By giving up the goal on the set piece, which was too simple of a goal, we put ourselves in a bad position,” said the manager.