WHO: Memphis 901 FC or SC, whatever, same diff, 1W-2D-5L, 5 points, 15th place Eastern Conference
WHAT: A regular season USL Championship match/Official Kentucky Derby Festival 2019 Event
WHEN: Tuesday, April 30, 2019, 7:00 p.m.
WHERE: Louisville Slugger Field, 401 E. Main Street, Louisville, KY 40202
WATCH: AT. SLUGGER. FIELD. It’s Derby Week, you aren’t really working tomorrow, anyway. Get your purple on, get down there, and have the kind of time you’re supposed to be having this week about a day early. No one will judge you!
But if you can’t make it because you’re trapped under something very heavy, you can still watch it on WBKI-58, stream it on ESPN+, or listen on one of the iHeart AM radio stations, probably 790 WKRD.
MARCH: It’s a midweek match but the Tailgaters don’t care about your weekday work schedule. They’re out there right now, probably, making Humana employees insanely jealous and trying to figure out how to reconfigure their PTO days.
PRE-MATCH TAILGATE
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!PRE-MATCH MARCH
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!
POST-MATCH CELEBRATION
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? Welcome to Derby Week, soccer fans! It’s my favorite time of the year, which has only been augmented by the addition of a Louisville City match dropped right in the middle of it tonight! AM SO EXCITE.
Thanks to Derby stuff and kids soccer stuff and work stuff I haven’t gotten the chance to update y’all about much LouCity/USL news. We have yet another goalkeeper now, a guy named Ben Holt. Welcome to Louisville, Ben, even though I sincerely hope that you never have to play because Tim Dobrowolski, Chris Hubbard and Ben Lundt miraculously become healthy.
Y’all haven’t missed much USL-wise, really. I’ll get another update from that arena out to you on Thursday, by which point if you’re in Louisville and still on the internet what are you really doing?
Anyway. Memphis.
Hackworth said some nice things about these guys on the radio this morning. Something along the lines of “Tim Mulqueen is a good coach, these guys have had a tough stretch of recent form, they generate a lot of scoring chances and don’t convert them.” Sounds like a purple team we all know and love except, thankfully, it’s not.
Memphis, a 2019 expansion side, has one win in eight matches. They’ve scored five goals all season, and conceded ten. Two of their five goals were assisted, and those five goals came from 30 shots on target for a very low conversion rate of just over 7%. They’ve already picked up fifteen yellow cards, something to keep an eye on.
Memphis is a pretty good crossing team, completing over 25% of their attempts, and wins 65% of their dribbles, which is pretty impressive, really. They appear to be a bit direct, with most of their passes going forward, but complete enough of them that you wouldn’t call them a boot-and-pray team.
Memphis are desperate for points, so I’d be on the lookout for a defend-and-counter approach in this game, especially in light of other visitors’ success on that front until recently. Louisville City is going to have to be smart enough to understand they can’t get caught out on counters while still trying to find a way to unlock 901’s defense. That hasn’t gone particularly well for Morados so far this season, but there are reasons to believe this game might go differently.
On the injury front, rumor has it that Luke Spencer and Cuatro might be back at least in the 18. That means John Hackworth might have some options at his disposal now in attack, if not necessarily in defense. I think we can probably expect to see the back four/three setup we’ve seen lately with Paco Craig, Taylor Peay, Oscar and Franno in the rearguard with Sean Totsch sliding in and out of midfield and the space between the two fulltime centerbacks. The problem with that look is it sometimes leaves empty space in front of the back line when Totsch vacates it, but it hasn’t burned City so far.
I’d still expect to see Thiam starting somewhere up front, with Magnus Rasmussen, Speedy Williams and Niall McCabe behind him. The open question is who plays the other wing/second striker role. Lucky Mkosana has improved a lot there, but I think if Cuatro is healthy, he might be in that spot tonight. Sunny Jane might also be an option there if he’s healthy.
In any event, this should be a pretty tight game. City need the points. Memphis is probably better than their record suggests. This is really going to be a game, in my opinion, where the team with the better focus wins. Let’s hope the horses and mint juleps distract the Memphians and Los Morados come home with the roses at the end of the night.
VAMOS MORADOS, VAMOS A GANAR!
