WHO: St. Louis FC
WHAT: A USL Championship Playoffs quarterfinal, or a conference semifinal if you’re into semantics
WHEN: Saturday, October 17, 2020, 7:30 p.m.
WHERE: Lynn Family Stadium
WATCH: WBKI, ESPN+, and listen on 840 WHAS
MARCH: Can’t be doin’ that
WHO, AGAIN? It’s St. Louis. Our oldest friends, our oldest enemies. STL and LOU have already played each other four times this season. Three of those matches were rather nip-and-tuck, both clubs earning a win, a draw and a loss. The match that wasn’t close was St. Louis’s last (we thought) trip to Louisville that ended in a 3-0 rout that wasn’t particularly close. In that match, City deployed Danny Cruz’s 3-5-2 to great effect, and then we never saw it again.
No one’s pulling out much in the way of new tricks on Saturday. This is probably the best St. Louis team we’ve ever seen, and it’s tragic that they happened to exist in the club’s last year in competition. The cards are already on the table for both clubs, so this match will just come down to who can execute better and limit mistakes.
St. Louis isn’t a team that takes a lot of risks. They do want to disrupt the midfield and create in transition. This season, they got their work done against Louisville City on set plays and turnovers. That’s prosthetic recipe again tomorrow. City will again have to be disciplined in when they choose to open up and attack and be really aware when they turn the ball over.
Hanging over all of this is the St. Louis narrative. They’re Cinderella. Butch and Sundance. All that. People love a good underdog story, the little team that could, beating the odds and winning it all. All City can do to compete with that is just play the way they’ve been playing. Create and convert chances, defend hard, and it’s on to the conference final again.
Morados are the better team. They are. And while single game knockout playoffs can create random results sometimes that don’t beat out who’s actually better, I don’t think that’s what happens in this game. City is playing the best ball in the league right now and have looked absolutely unflappable since August. I feel pretty good about this game, and so should everyone in purple.
VAMOS.
