With Sebastián Driussi possibly injured badly enough to miss matches again — a state of affairs adversely affecting the start of the 2024 season — pending decisions about penalty kicks might already be made for Austin FC head coach Josh Wolff and whichever 11 players are healthy enough to take the field in future matches.
One of the big takeaways from Verde’s 2-0 home loss against Portland Timbers FC on Wednesday is the the formerly automatic-from-the-spot Argentine — in his first nine MLS PKs, at least — has now missed his last two attempts. So, if Verde wins another PK, who should step up to the spot?
“We’ll talk to the group about it,” Wolff said. “But Seba’s our guy. It's like anything, you have moments where you miss opportunities and gotta get back on the bike … but we'll talk to him.”
Wolff acknowledged that the missed PK transformed the match, though not entirely. “I think you get the goal … the game is what we expect it to be. We're gonna have the ball, we're gonna push the opponent back. You get rewarded with a penalty and yeah, obviously we hope that Seba scores that. And that would again put them in a bad spot, 1-0 early into the game and away from home.”
![Gyasi Zardes vs. Portland Timbers](https://verdeallday.com/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f2328ecec-df6a-4f01-a733-5b99c9f3a944_1600x900-jpeg.jpg)