The wild days of the NASL in the 1970’s provided Alan Hinton unique perspective on the looming Cascadia Cup clash between Vancouver and Seattle. Perhaps more so than anyone else.
For most outside observers, the Cascadia Cup begins with Portland-Seattle. The U.S. portion of the cup tends to suss out the most virulent tifos, the most pointed criticisms for the losers, the most jubilant reverie for the winners. And it certainly deserves its reputation. The fixture tends to land atop most everyone’s list of the league’s best rivalries. The game itself is a powder keg of emotion.
But the northern leg of Sounders FC’s Cascadia Cup rivalry is not to be underestimated in either passion or longevity. Going back to NASL and minor league days, the Seattle and Vancouver have faced off a staggering 135 times since 1974, with Seattle owning a 64-49-22 edge all time. In the MLS era, meanwhile, the teams are a flat 4-4-4 against each other.
By the time the 1978 NASL season arrived, Sounders FC owned a 6-4-0 record against Vancouver since the teams played their first match in 1974, including a 2-0 mark in the playoffs. That’s when Hinton showed up in Vancouver to play his final professional season in 1978. The eventual Whitecaps and then Sounders head coach shattered the NASL assists record with 30 that year and helped Vancouver to its first division crown.
So for Hinton at least, the coming match between Vancouver and Seattle means more than the Portland rivalry.
“We had crowds of 30-odd thousand at Empire Stadium, and we used to come down to the Kingdome in those days and play, and sometimes win and sometimes drink beer on the way back if we’d won or lost,” Hinton said. “It’s a great rivalry...Years ago they’d come down in their thousands. There was no television in those days, so you’d get as much as three or four thousand Vancouver fans that’d all go to F.X. McRory’s and get jugged up and sing ‘Oggie Oggie Oggie,’ and we’d start singing ‘Seattle Sounders.’”
Since those early days the rivalry’s only gained steam, notably with the advent of Vancouver’s inclusion in MLS in 2011. But even before that, the teams were battling on a smaller but no less intense stage. After all, the Cascadia Cup was not an MLS invention.
While the teams fanned oxygen on a raging flame as they dipped in and out of leagues together, the rivalry from 1974-2009 (when Sounders FC became the first Pacific Northwest side to join MLS) provided all the kindling they needed. Playing in the NASL, the A-League and USL First Division, Seattle and Vancouver waged some memorable battles in those years, which produced some of the rivalry’s modern era heroes and villains. When the Cascadia Cup got its modern beginning in 2004, when both teams were in USL First Division, the intensity only heightened.
The Sounders won their first official Cascadia Cup trophy in 2006, and it’s since won three, which ties the team for second behind Vancouver’s five. With a win against Vancouver this weekend, they’ll pull within just one with four.
“It’s been a great benefit for Major League Soccer with the advent of the Cascadia Cup,” Hinton said.
The teams’ first match against one another after Vancouver joined MLS in 2011 was a harbinger for the gritty, tooth-and-nail rivalry this was to become in the modern era. Despite the fact that Whitecaps FC had been in MLS for a mere three months, the Canadian outfit took an early lead, only to be denied by a Mauro Rosales goal in the 81st minute. Minutes later, Osvaldo Alonso scored just his second goal in two years to give Sounders FC a 2-1 lead, which Eric Hassli erased with one of the greatest goals in MLS history.
Hassli, despite the fact that his MLS career wouldn’t last much longer, quickly became a dirty word in Seattle, and his goal a painful stab in the side for a Seattle team that had to sweat out a Cascadia Cup title it could’ve put away earlier had it not been for Hassli’s theatrics. His volley from a coffin corner on the right side of the field came off a flick to himself, and it only lost MLS Goal of the Year honors to a ridiculous juggling strike from Darlington Nagbe, another Cascadia rival in Portland.
Later that year, Fredy Montero cemented his legacy in the rivalry by scoring twice in a 3-1 win at Empire Stadium to bring home the first victory by either team in the MLS edition of the rivalry. Montero did it again in the first meeting between the teams in 2012 with a 90th minute tally at BC Place, which salvaged a draw from a game Vancouver had seemingly in hand. By the time Montero left the club after the 2012 season, he’d amassed four goals in four matches against Vancouver over two years. He remains the club’s most decisively effective Whitecaps assassin to date.
The rivalry whipsawed violently in the intervening years until spilling out to 2015, where we dropped into a May 16 meeting between the teams at BC Place earlier this season.
Rivalries have a funny way of crowning their own kings. While Designated Players and top money guys usually own the broader statistical categories by the end of the season, fierce rivalries tend to produce unlikely champions of their own. In the course of the modern series between Vancouver and Seattle, no player has done more in that regard than Seattle’s Chad Barrett. After all, he’s scored more in this Seattle-Vancouver rivalry in 33 minutes than Clint Dempsey and Obafemi Martins have combined in two years.
During the first meeting this year, Barrett managed to squeeze off just three shots in the course of his 72 minutes on the field. Two of them were brilliantly taken goals, propelling Sounders FC to a deserved 2-0 win to take a lead in the race for the Cascadia Cup. Adding to Barrett’s legend, he’d played just 129 minutes over the season’s first nine games and scored zero goals. Against a surging Vancouver team, on the road, he scored twice before the 40th minute.
“It’s a dogfight every single time,” Barrett said. “It’s chippy and in-your-face.”
Right now, Sounders FC is doing its best to pull out of a flat spin that’s pushed the team down from a first-place perch in the Western Conference it had held for much of the first third of the season. As the history between these teams proves, we should be in for a wild match from the outset, regardless of outside form. Motivation is practically baked into the match ball.
“Maybe that’s what we need right now,” Barrett said. “A nice little Cascadia rival.”
