Sporting Kansas City captain Matt Besler made his customary appearance on Sports Radio 810 WHB this morning, joining The Border Patrol hosts Nate Bukaty, Steven St. John and Jake Gutierrez to discuss the strange times that have enveloped all of society.
The COVID-19 public health crisis has prompted Major League Soccer to suspend play for the next eight weeks, with a targeted return date of May 10. MLS has also prohibited clubs from full-team training sessions through Friday at the earliest. Consequently, Besler has been placed in the unusual position of training solo at his home in Leawood, Kansas.
Besler reflected on the unprecedented circumstances and also shared his thoughts on the recent retirement of longtime Benny Feilhaber. Listen to the full podcast above and see Besler’s remarks below.
On Sporting’s training program during the MLS moratorium…
“We have individual programs based on your position, so defenders, forwards and midfielders have their own (regiment). Depending on your position group, our fitness coach Joey Harty sends out daily workouts through an app that we use as a team. You log on every morning and see the workout. Most of it is circuit-based stuff you can do at your house that you don’t need weights for. A lot of the runs you can do on your own, whether you want to run on a track, run through your neighborhood or find a treadmill in your apartment. You do the workouts and you record your times so that you can hold each other accountable.”
On the challenges of training individually from home…
“The hardest part is we don’t know how hard to push ourselves right now. If you were to tell me that we’re going to be playing games in five or six weeks, my training is going to be completely different than if you were to tell me we won’t play a game for another 10 or 12 weeks. How much running are we talking about? There’s a long, slow jog we do that’s anywhere from 30-40 minutes, but a lot of the stuff is interval-based where you’re basically trying to run as fast as you can for two minutes, jog for a minute, run as fast as you can for two minutes, jog for a minute and keep repeating that anywhere from eight to 10 times. If you’re on a treadmill doing fast intervals, you want to be going 10 miles per hour at the slowest. If you can get to 12 miles per hour, great. That’s in between a 5-6 mile pace.”
On Benny Feilhaber’s recent retirement…
“I want to give Benny a shout out for a heck of a career. He was a fun guy to play with and one of my best friends while he was here. He had an awesome career—one of the best careers all-time for an (American) soccer player.”
On Feilhaber’s incredible memory and knowledge of soccer…
“A lot of players remember the details of certain games, but Benny is on a whole different level of anybody I have ever seen with his knowledge. His ability to recall certain plays and players and scores is amazing. When he left our team to join LAFC (in 2018) and then came back to Sporting last year, we would talk about games Sporting played in 2018 when he was in LA. And he would give me rundowns of plays that happened (in Sporting matches) and I would have no idea what he was talking about. I’m like, ‘How do you remember this game, you weren’t even on our team?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, but I watched most of your games and I remember that play.’ His soccer knowledge is unreal.”
On what made Feilhaber a special player and teammate…
“He’s one of the best players that I’ve played with. When you look at Benny, he has some qualities that are rare with his creativity and his vision and his ability to find that final pass. That’s one of the hardest things to do in soccer. A lot of the other things he (excelled at) as well, and I think he was underrated. We shouldn’t just remember him as a creative No. 10. He was a complete player. He got the job done, and when the time came for him to put in the work and grind, he would do that. He was so smart and so intelligent, and he just understood the flow of the game. When you’re able to play with a guy like that, you don’t even need to communicate. You’re just on the same page, and when you play with players like that, that’s really what makes the game fun. Benny was definitely one of those guys.”
