One step forward, two steps back.
It’s hard to frame the Sounders’ 2016 season to this point in any other way. April was good to the Sounders, starting a stretch in which they won four of six and lost just a single game in the span of about six weeks. Since then, Seattle’s journey has been halting and studded with two setbacks for every triumph.
Indeed, since a 2-0 win over the San Jose Earthquakes on May 7, Seattle is 2-7-1 and has failed to put together two positive results in a row. And Seattle’s 5-0 win over FC Dallas on July 13 accounted for fully half of Seattle’s goal total over that sluggish 10-game span.
It may not be entirely accurate to say that the playoff hopes of any team in MLS are hanging by a thread with nearly half of the year to go, but as we’ve noted before, the margin for error is gone. Over their final 16 regular season games, the Sounders probably need to average about twice their points per game output from the first half of the season in order to make the playoffs for the eighth consecutive year.
Furthermore, the U.S Open Cup can’t provide any respite from the rocks this year. For so long a bastion for the Sounders, who boast four cup trophies, a deflating 4-2 loss to the LA Galaxy at midweek ended their search for a fifth in the quarterfinals.
That casts a more desperate light than usual on Sunday’s match against Sporting Kansas City at Children’s Mercy Park in Kansas City. In ninth place in the Western Conference with no competitions on the horizon save the battle for the postseason, Seattle knows the task that lay ahead.
Three points or bust.
“We’ve got to buckle down,” captain center back Brad Evans said this week after the loss in LA. “Just keep saying the same thing every week, but that’s how you have to approach it. It’s a bit of a Groundhog Day, even when you’re winning. It’s keep doing the same thing. And when you’re losing, you’ve got to keep doing the same things that we’ve talked about: put your head down, work, sacrifice yourself for the team, all the things everybody’s read in the press. We’ve just got to keep working and bang away some goals and hopefully that changes the outlook for us.”
Seattle won’t have to win every match from here until the end of the season to make the playoffs, but they’ll have to steal a couple road wins in order to finish sixth in a comically deep Western Conference. And there’s no time like the present, in a steamy environment on the outskirts of Kansas City, to jump-start a turnaround that has been stubbornly late in arriving.
Like seemingly everything else, the Sounders have good news tinged with bad this weekend. Clint Dempsey sat out the 3-1 loss against the Portland Timbers due to a red card he picked up in the win over FC Dallas, but he’ll be back on Sunday. Meanwhile, Osvaldo Alonso, who’s having his best season in his eighth year in Seattle, earned a suspension for Sporting KC on yellow card accumulation in the Portland loss.
The return of Dempsey is never not good news, but losing Alonso just as his midfield partnership with Erik Friberg and Cristian Roldan began to gel is not. The problem against the Timbers was poor transition defense and an inability to put away chances, not the connection in the middle. The Sounders have struggled at times this season to keep their shape, but this - Alonso deep with Friberg the intermediary and Roldan free to roam higher to pick out runners - was finally the way it should’ve looked.
Now, yet again, Sounders coach Sigi Schmid has to retool a major facet of his lineup just as a part of it gets rolling. Hurdles seem to spring up with alarming regularity for the Sounders in key spots in 2016.
The continuing storyline of the Sounders’ season is where the goals come from, and while they don’t have any readier answers now than they did a week ago, Sporting KC might help their search with a clogged injury report. Nuno Coelho has rapidly emerged as one of the best center backs in MLS in his brief time in Kansas City, and he’ll miss Sunday’s match with a hamstring injury. U.S. international Matt Besler, meanwhile, has spent time on the bench lately but is unable to fill in thanks to an injury he suffered in training this week. That puts Sporting KC in an uncomfortable spot defensively, a weakness the Sounders will surely try to exploit considering their dearth of goals this year.
Sporting KC has always defended in great swarming clouds under coach Peter Vermes, a proponent of nitro-charged soccer, physicality and heavyweight punch-counterpunch soccer. This was the franchise, after all, that set an unbelievable precent in 2012 by only allowing 27 goals in 34 games.
They are similarly physical this year, even if it isn’t a classic vintage. Only four teams average more tackles per game than Sporting KC (Seattle, by comparison, is last in the league in this category), and they rarely overthink possession. Dom Dwyer, who’s eighth in MLS in goals with eight, loves playing in Kansas City partially because his service is so consistent. When you have a defensive midfield willing to pump in deep balls and a creator like Benny Feilhaber running the final third, life is good. In that sense, Seattle’s defensive task is relatively straightforward this weekend.
While Seattle awaits the arrival of the cavalry this summer in the form of a transfer or two, they’ll continue searching for the elusive win that’ll break them from their repetitive cycle of one step forward and two back.
