The Houston Dynamo confirmed Tuesday that they came up short in their bid for a deadline day deal to bring 22-year-old attacker Luis Advincula to MLS from Peru’s Sporting Cristal.
After negotiations picked up late last week the Dynamo had hopes of bringing the talented young attacker – who has been linked with Arsenal in the past – in before the April 15 MLS transfer deadline.
Despite reports out of Peru on Sunday suggesting the deal was done pending signatures, Houston came up short in adding the Peru international to their stable of attackers.
“He’s played for Peru in Copa America and some World Cup qualifiers and we thought we had a really good chance of bringing him here, and then at the end something out of our control switched it,” Dynamo head coach Dominic Kinnear told Multimedios after Tuesday’s training.
What changed at the last minute? The Dynamo boss did not go into specifics, but feels the club did everything it could before the spring deadline.
“I think sometimes it’s not in your hands. Sometimes it comes down to a club and maybe a sports agency that owns a player and maybe their agreement,” Kinnear said. “I thought we did our part to bring him here. We were just kind of waiting for confirmation and at the last minute it totally turned the wrong way.”
With the deadline for player movement expiring, the club will have to wait until the summer transfer window to make any potential improvements to the roster.
Ownby suffers injury setback
Promising rookie right winger Brian Ownby suffered a dislocated left elbow in Monday’s 1-0 reserve loss to the Chicago Fire.
The injury happened in the middle of the first half when Ownby slid across a Chicago attacker in an attempt to snuff out a potential shot and landed awkwardly on his left arm. Immediately Ownby knew something was wrong.
“Once I landed I felt the pop and thought ‘Oh that can’t be good.’ Then I heard Tyler [Deric] and Adam [Moffat] yelling for the trainers to come over and in my head I was thinking ‘Oh man that really can’t be good,’” the rookie told MLSsoccer.com Tuesday. “Once they flipped me over I looked down and thought ‘That’s not the way my elbow usually looks.’”
The severity of the injury is not yet known but the current thought is that the winger could miss up to six weeks.
“It stinks. It’s an injury and nothing I can really do about it,” the 22-year-old said. “I’m going to take this opportunity to watch the outside mids, see more of what we do and how I can do it better now that I’m watching instead of worrying about my performance.”
Darrell Lovell covers the Houston Dynamo for MLSsoccer.com.
