WHO: Hartford Athletic, 0-0-2, 17th place Eastern Conference

WHAT: A regular season USL Championship match

WHEN: Saturday, March 23, 2019, 7:00 p.m.

WHERE: Louisville Slugger Field, 401 E. Main Street, Louisville, Ky. 40202

WATCH: At the game is preferable. It’s the home opener! Your first chance to see the Two Time reigning USL Champions up close and in person, if you didn’t go to Atlanta or Cary the past two weeks! It’s basically spring! Your favorite college basketball team isn’t playing at the same time! Unless you’re a Murray State fan, and we’ll forgive you for that. BUT OTHERWISE, NO EXCUSES! GO TO THE GAME.

MARCH:

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? A bunch of Scandinavian dudes that ended up in Connecticut. Hartford is an expansion team playing under a pretty decent coach but with no clear identity yet. That makes them hard to scout and game plan for. They’ve lost two games to some okay to good teams. They’ve managed to score one goal. They’ve put up an average number of shots. They’ve got some talented players in Sem de Wit, Phillip Rasmussen, Sebastian Dalgaard, Mads Jorgensen, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Jose Angulo. Only one of those names is not actually a Hartford player.

Given what little we know or can expect from Hartford, this is a game for LouCity to try and focus a bit on themselves. Themselves, however, will be missing three key players as Sunny Jane is off to Lesotho for AFCON qualifying and Speedy Williams and Shaun Francis are in Jamaica trying to get them qualified for the CONCACAF Nations League.

Those key absences mean we don’t really have a clear picture of who’s going to be in the starting XI. Paco and Alexis are probably starting at centerback. Goalkeeper is evidently an open question, though not one that concerns me all that much at the moment. Oscar will play fullback on one side or the other. We may see a reprisal of Sean Totsch at right back. Or maybe he won’t! Taylor Peay hasn’t hit the field in a match yet, maybe he’ll play over there.

In midfield, Paolo is a lock to start somewhere, as is Niall. Whether Paolo remains at the six or ends up playing higher up the field in more of a creative role remains to be seen. Totsch looked pretty solid at defensive mid in his substitute appearance last week, and I wouldn’t hate to see an experiment where he gets more minutes in that spot. We haven’t seen Carranza play at all, and he and Napo Matsoso would seem to be depth for Speedy or Niall at the 8/10 positions they tend to float in and out of.

The attacking three will probably still be Ownby, Cuatro and Spencer, though I wouldn’t be surprised to see Thiam get a start, either. Or maybe Mkosana gets a run at one of those spots. This is the fun part about this season, we have literally no idea! I’m almost giddy to see the lineup card at this point, much less the game.

As for game plan, the formation and lineup matters less to me than seeing the guys be able to connect passes between their lines and playing a sound game defensively. The one nice thing about Slugger is it’s harder to play counterattacking soccer on since the field is so short, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Jimmy Nielsen is no fool and I’m sure he watched the tape of the North Carolina game. Morados will need to be mindful of that and focus on a clean sheet first before trying to score eleventy goals on the hapless Athletic. But let’s do that, too.

VAMOS MORADOS, VAMOS A GANAR!