WHO: Our age-old rivals, the Indianapolis Elevens. 10W-3D-2L, 33 points, 1st place Eastern Conference
WHAT: A regular season USL Championship match, but so much more than that.
WHEN: Saturday, June 29, 2019, 7:00 p.m. EDT
WHERE: Cavernous Lucas Oil Stadium, home of the Indianapolis Colts
WATCH: At the game would be good! There’s a sizable purple contingent making the trek up 65 through the wilds of southern Indiana for the match, and the more the merrier. Otherwise, the game will be on WBKI-58, streamed on ESPN+ as per usual, and radioed at one of the iHeart/Clear Channel AM stations.
WHO, AGAIN? The Louisville-Indianapolis Proximity Association Football Contest. A rivalry so ingrained in sports history that to try to erase it would be tantamount to Thanos snapping his fingers not once but two times. Check up on your LIPAFC history here in case Will Smith or Chris Hemsworth have recently erased your memory of this, the most preeminent derby/darby in the annals of sport, if not history itself, both recorded and unrecorded.
Indy loaded up in the offseason, getting rid of Jack McInerney and Soony Saad and replacing them with 2018 MVP candidate Thomas Enovoldsen and Ilija Ilic, and a bunch of FCC’s USL castoffs. The ’18 version of the XI was kind of a slap-dash arrangement to begin with, as the Indianapolisians (maybe?) weren’t 100% sure they’d even have a team that season after the collapse of the NASL thanks to the Cosmos. While I have previously been dubious about Martin Rennie’s coaching acumen, he’s certainly left little room for such rumblings based on his record so far this season, with ten wins in fifteen games and a team suddenly atop the table after beating lowly Birmingham midweek.
The record is perhaps a little deceiving, however. Eight of Indy’s ten wins are against teams 11th in the table or lower. The only teams in the upper half of the table that the XI have beaten are 10th place Pittsburgh and 8th place Charleston. We Louisville City fans know that if you want to be really great, you have to actually lose or draw to those lower table teams in disappointing fashion and then really put your dukes up against the top tier competition.
Indy, as I mentioned, had a mid-week game and so might be a bit fatigued on Saturday. At this point, I, a Louisville City fan, will take whatever advantage I can get. Paco Craig should be back, so the only absences from the roster should be Shaun Francis, Speedy Williams, and the ever-fluctuating and yet undisclosed list of who’s injured on the roster.
These are both teams that like to possess the ball and pass quite well. Indy’s offense seems to be a bit more dependent on crossing the ball into the box, as they’ve attempted nearly double the number of crossing attempts on the season as Louisville City. The real story in this game, though, might be defense. City’s hasn’t been good this season, while Indy’s has been fabulous. The Elevens have only surrendered nine goals all season and have an equal number of clean sheets. Morados, by contrast have given up 20 goals and only have four clean sheets.
Saturday is a big game for our Boys in Purple, no question. Time to even up some of those GF/GA statistics. Continue our recent run of dominance in the LIPAFC. Maybe actually put together a complete performance for the first time in about a month. It’s right there, y’all, let’s just grab it. VAMOS MORADOS.
