Sporting Kansas City vs. Colorado Rapids - Game Preview

The Colorado Rapids are currently ice cold. That gummed up and frozen ice cream that's been in my freezer for going on three years now would look at the Rapids and say 'Dayum, they're cold!'. They are currently on an 0-2-1 slide which included two games where they got beat by a total goal count of 7-2 and a game that by any stretch of the imagination the Rapids should have won but just couldn't seem to pull out.

Sporting Kansas City are red hot. A box of Red Hots that had just been dropped into a pit of lava would - in the instant before they disintegrated into the lava of course - look at SKC and say 'Dayum, they're hot!'. (I will avoid making the obvious Paris Hilton reference here because it is no longer 2007, when only Jay Leno still found those jokes funny.) The Sporks are currently on an eight game unbeaten run in league play which coincidentally started around the same time that their brand new home stadium opened, the place that the Rapids just happen to have to walk into on two days of rest today.

Colorado has a little bit of hope coming into this match simply because once again, there's a very good chance that we'll see the Conor Casey/Omar Cummings tandem up top, the tandem that we've only seen twice this year, and not even a single time for a full game yet. Either way, that Sporting offense is powerful as well with Omar Bravo, Teal Bunbury, CJ Sapong and others providing the goals for the former Wizards. Ryan Smith - the man who scored Kansas' only goal last time these teams met - is no longer with the squad, but that's not exactly 'happy time to dance' good news.

Not the most optimistic time to be a Rapids fan, especially considering that the Rapids played an incredibly hard fought game against Houston only a couple of days ago and pretty much everyone playing today minus Conor Casey will have played that game as well, unless Gary Smith decides to jar up the lineup a bit. I'm not sure that would be a much better idea, since jarring the lineup has given us nothing but pain so far in 2011.

UZ's PREDICTION: 2-1 SKC