WHO: Atlanta United 2, 4W-5D-12L, 17 points, 16th place Eastern Conference
WHAT: A regular season USL Championship match
WHEN: Sunday (?), August 11, 2019, 3:00 (?) P.M.
WHERE: Louisville Slugger Field, 401 E. Main Street, Louisville, KY 40202
WATCH: At the game! Kids are apparently half price, and the club set aside 300 free tickets for teachers in honor of school being back in session this coming week. If you can’t make it, though, you can watch on WBKI, listen on one of the iHeart AM stations, or stream it on ESPN+.
MARCH:
Join us and the Lou City Tailgaters for all your pre-match festivity needs! Tailgating typically starts around four (4) hours prior to kickoff but you may find a few die-hards out there earlier. The tailgate is supporter run and supporter funded. We recommend BYOB and food contributions. If you do partake we ask that you contribute to the general fund. The main tailgate is located at the corner of N Preston St and E Witherspoon St in the Riverside Parking Cobalt Lot. The Coopers are joined here by several other SGs, so come say hello to everyone!
About 30-40 minutes prior to kickoff we’ll start the March to the Match. Join us as we march around the tailgate lot, up Preston St, and into the east entrance. Flags will be waving, smoke will be popping, and we’ll be chanting and singing the whole way!
After the match concludes, we have beers at Against the Grain which is conveniently located right outside the Slugger Field gate. Make sure you ask for a pint of the Coopers rotating charity tap! $0.50 from every pour (on home match days) goes to Shirley’s Way, a most excellent local charity helping families of those afflicted with cancer.
WHO, AGAIN? ATLUTD2 is a not very good team that Louisville City should beat. Naturally, that’s not something we can find much comfort in after saying very similar things about Bethlehem, Birmingham, Loudoun, and Swope Park, all of whom City has somehow lost to this season. So it’s gonna take some concentration, effort, and maybe a lucky bounce to get this one over the line. That’s not a sentence that I ever thought I’d be writing about Atlanta United 2, whom have only won one road match all season, but here we are in 2019.
Atlanta is predictably leaky in the back, having given up 49 goals on the season, good for over two per game. Then again, so was Swope Park. Even worse, their conversion rate is fairly poor at 11%. Worser still, LouCity’s is still under 10%. Atlantwo are actually pretty strong in possession, averaging 54%, and complete a respectable number of passes per game. However, they’re also pretty foul prone, having conceded 312 whistles and 57(!!!) yellow cards on the season.
Bienvenue Kanakimana leads the team in scoring with six goals on the season, and we can expect to see him and probably Laurent Kissidou on Sunday. Whether we recognize any of the other names on the Twonited team sheet is up for debate, as only twelve of the thirty eight players that have seen time for the Lil Spikes have more than ten appearances. We might see Andrew Carleton, Chris Goslin, Florentin Pogba, and George Bello, or we might see a bunch of guys we’ve literally never heard of before. Yay!
With that in mind, Lou City again just needs to focus on itself, what the team does well, and not let that level of intensity drop. It was great to see a clean sheet last week. More of that. I hate watching our Morados struggle to put any semblance of offense together, but that might just be who we are this season. At some point, though, it’ll take someone taking some initiative to create a solid chance in the box and City’s got to use their resolve to convert it into something. Preferably more than once.
Let’s do it. VAMOS MORADOS.
