If Sporting Kansas City existed when the Wizard of Oz was made, Dorothy would not have wanted to come back to Kansas. She would have taken her little dog and stuck around in the Emerald City, taken to grunge, bad coffee and invented being an arrogant asshole. A series of defeats, ranging from the unlucky, to inept, to wasteful and finally woefully outclassed have little kicked the shit out Sporting faithful and the calls for the head of Peter Vermes have started in earnest wherever Sporting fans are gathered.

I am certainly not dreaming about the MLS Cup or US Open Cup landing on our doorstep any time soon and it is hard to believe that the playoffs are still possible given where we are now in the table. Seven games, one win and one draw. Four lousy points and wretched defending. Confusing team selections and a reliance on a tactical plan that failed us in 2010 seem to make things as hopeless as they have been in recent memory.

Is it all doom and gloom though? Are we really ready to throw in the towel on the season and declare a thirty four game season dead after a measly seven games? Not me. I have channeled all my vim and anger, frustration and malice into several posts along the ”Fire Vermes’ lines recently and I get about two thirds of the way through and realize that is not what I want to happen at all.

Does that make me happy with where we are now? Not at all.

We have four points from seven games, four from twenty one. No matter which way you dress this pig of a season up it isn’t pretty but if you look at the first seven road games of 2010 we had …. four points from seven games … four from twenty one. One win and one draw. The most damning part of this for Vermes may well be the lack of improvement over last year in terms of the record but we are no worse than we were in road games at this time last year and last year we almost made the playoffs.

It is easier to get to the post season with the expanded 2011 playoff format.

We barely lost out last season and this team has more talent, I am convinced of it. The midfield we ran last year was Arnaud, Rocastle and Auvray – Rocastle being the notable recent absentee isn’t going to change us from a winner to a loser on his own but with Kamara, Bunbury, Harrington, Espinoza, Neilsen and co sticking around the only fundamental changes have been to central defense and via the acquisition of Omar Bravo. Now I think Cesar is a bum, the quintessential overpaid mercenary journeyman that MLS has been famous for and the kind of signing that would not have been out of place in 1996. Aurellien Collin on the other hand looks like the real deal.

Bravo is the man. He has got so much talent and so much class that he can’t fail to make a difference at a time when Teal Bunbury is struggling and CJ Sapong has been yanked for Zusi while we wait Ryan Smith return. We are a week or two away from having a full strength starting lineup for the first time this season.

We can get back in contention. We can still challenge for the playoffs.

We still have 80% of the season remaining.

So what needs to happen?

Well first this wretched road trip does need to finish and it will soon enough. If anybody ever thought in any season that the team would qualify for the playoffs on the back of their amazing away form then they are sadly mistaken. MLS is all about home form for all but the very best of teams, and yes the away points count the same but for a large number of teams they are almost bonus points.

We need a decent run of stability in the lineup. We really could use a break on the injuries and the suspensions.

And what of Peter Vermes?

I don’t want to root against him. It means starting again. It means another rebuild. It means another guy bringing in new players while struggling to deal with the legacy of the other guys personnel. It means the season has been irretrievably lost which it hasn’t been.

Short of us signing Harry Redknapp I am not sure who else could come here and make an immediate impact. Instead we would probably get somebody unproven and hell after Onalfo and Vermes as debutant managers I am not sure I want to deal with this again. I don’t want to see Sporting hop from one bad situation to another because of a knee jerk reaction to the longest road stint any team has ever had in my memory.

We all knew this was going to be tough coming in and almost everybody said we needed 10-12 points to have a shot. Mike Kuhn yelled himself silly telling us all this was going to be a train wreck yet the organization wanted the games in the new stadium and now we are paying for it. I find it next to impossible justifying firing Vermes when we have set him up to fail in such dramatic fashion.

On June 9^th all the excuses go away however. 3-4 games into our extended home run should reveal all there is to know about the true extent of this squad and managers problems but for now we just need to get the team home.

We do look like crap, I’ll not deny it, but our first road win last season was the game in Columbus in late July. There really isn’t much difference between this year and last. Slow start and all.

Now where are those little red shoes …..