Sunday, November 24, 2013

Sporting KC to Face Real Salt Lake at MLS Cup

With a 1-0 win tonight and a 5-2 win on aggregate, Real Salt Lake booked themselves a trip to Kansas City for the MLS Cup final on December 7th. Salt Lake had a dominating effort over two legs and took out the Western Conference's top seeded Portland Timbers.

The two teams will meet for the second time this season.  KC won the first meeting at Rio Tinto Stadium earlier this year, 2-1. Soony Saad and Ike Opara got the goals for KC in that game, Opara's coming in the 97th minute to win the game.

The match up on December 7th though will be completely different. When the two teams met on 7/20 both teams were missing first team contributors. KC was missing the likes of Matt Besler and Paulo Nagamura. Salt Lake was suffering the bigger loss, playing without Kyle Beckerman and Nick Rimando.

Despite the different players being available, a cup final is going to be completely. Different. Like it 2000 though, the final is going to be one of the best offensive teams facing off against one of the best defensive ones with RSL scoring 57 goals in the regular season while KC allowed an MLS low 30 goals. It's going to be a long wait over the next 2 weeks for this one.

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