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Rapids roll into Kansas City to tussle with Sporting

Jun 26, 2015 - 7:14 PM Kansas City, KS (SportsNetwork.com) - Sporting Kansas City looks to begin a new unbeaten streak on Saturday at Sporting Park as the club takes on the last-place Colorado Rapids.

Sporting saw its seven-game unbeaten streak halted last Sunday in a 2-1 defeat at Real Salt Lake, and the team will have a good chance to bounce back against the Rapids on Saturday.

Peter Vermes saw his side trade goals with RSL in the opening 30 minutes before Olmes Garcia scored the winning goal in the third minute of stoppage time thanks to a fortunate deflection off Sporting defender Kevin Ellis.

But despite the unlucky nature of the deciding goal, Vermes wasn't pleased with the overall performance of his team, which came under some heavy pressure from RSL and needed some good goalkeeping from Tim Melia to keep the side in the match.

"I don't necessarily know if we deserved a point," Vermes said, "with the aggressiveness that they had going to our goal, with the amount of saves Tim [Melia] had to come up with to keep us in the game."

Melia agreed with Vermes that his team wasn't at its best, and he will be hoping his team can get back to playing its game on Saturday.

"I think that we were under a little bit more pressure than we should have [been]," Melia said. "We didn't play our game. We didn't come here and do what we put in place for this game. I think that was seen on the field and that was the reason that they were getting as many opportunities as they did with set pieces."

Benny Feilhaber recorded his eighth assist of the season on Sporting's lone goal, giving him two goals and an assist over the last three matches. However, his status for Saturday's game is up in the air due to an injury issue as well as fellow midfielder Graham Zusi.

While Sporting is looking to start a new unbeaten streak, Colorado is aiming to end a five-game winless run after losing 2-0 at Orlando City SC on Wednesday.

Second-half goals from Cyle Larin and Kaka three minutes apart were the difference as the Rapids seemed to run out of steam after halftime.

Head coach Pablo Mastroeni was quite blunt in his assessment of his team's performance following the contest.

"The result was crap. As we've done all season, we put ourselves in good positions really early in the game but we just can't finish. I think they were much brighter in the second half, more commitment in the second half from them. Disappointed in the way that we conducted ourselves in the second half," said Mastroeni.

The Rapids have struggled all season to pick up points and score goals, but the team has been able to collect some results away from Dick's Sporting Goods Park, earning eight of their 15 points on the road while managing to score six of their league-low 12 goals on their travels.