It’s here. One game to decide the fate of a season.
It almost seems cruel, that a single 90 minutes will either grant the Seattle Sounders passage into the Western Conference Semifinals for an eighth consecutive season or send them home to an early offseason. In a lot of ways the 2016 season has seemed longer than any before it, spliced in the middle by a coaching change that more or less cut the season in half.
And now the Sounders are here, either a game from the next round or a game from the couch.
After playing their way into the playoffs with a coal fire-hot run over the last three months of the season, the Sounders play host to Sporting Kansas City on Thursday in the Knockout Round (7 p.m.; FS1/UniMas/KIRO 97.3 FM/El Rey 1360AM). The Sounders sewed up a No. 4 seed with a 2-1 win over Real Salt Lake on the final day of the regular season, which earned them a once-improbable playoff home game.
Should the Sounders navigate past Sporting KC, they’ll face the Colorado Rapids if RSL manages to bump off the LA Galaxy, or top-seeded FC Dallas if the Galaxy fend off RSL at home.
But first they’ll have to navigate past a Sporting KC team that’s beaten Seattle home and away in the only two meetings between the teams this year. But, as we’ve discussed this week, those results are more or less meaningless in the context of Thursday’s battle.
Since it’s pointless to reach into the previous two meetings between these teams for insight, what can Seattle reasonably expect to see from the side pouring over CenturyLink Field’s ramparts on Thursday? Let’s go back to Sporting KC’s most recent match for evidence.
Sporting KC dropped a San Jose team with no playoff aspirations 2-0 at home, and the scoreline was deserved. San Jose produced little in the way of incisiveness, and Sporting KC had the run of the match. But it wasn’t quite that lopsided. Coach Peter Vermes’ teams never try to completely take over a game via possession. Those moments are incidental to the flow of the match, and if Sporting KC owns upwards of 60 percent possession, it’s most likely because you’ve ceded it to them.
San Jose’s 47 percent possession wasn’t so much of a surprise. But here’s where the vast majority of Sporting KC’s attacking destructiveness came from: Benny Feilhaber.
Feilhaber’s pass map against San Jose is a construct of Vermes’ nominal 4-3-3. Granted cover by deeper midfielders Soni Mustivar and Paulo Nagamura, Feilhaber has license to pick out balls in the final third without worrying too deeply about tracking. That blue line indicates an assist, and the yellow is a pass that led to a shot. Not many MLS teams have a player comfortable living in this environment all game.
But the more confusing (and potentially disruptive) deployment option Vermes went with against San Jose was what he did with Roger Espinoza.
The Sounders have struggled for width all year, a fact lessened somewhat by Cristian Roldan’s performance on the right flank in the season finale against Real Salt Lake. The fact that Espinoza started as the left peg of the high line in Vermes’ 4-3-3 against San Jose indicates Sporting KC is dealing with some of the same issues. In the same way Roldan isn’t a right midfielder, Espinoza certainly isn’t a left winger.
But this creates some attacking issues of its own for opposing front lines. San Jose couldn’t figure out what to do with Espinoza dropping into space on the left next to Mustivar, who used Espinoza as a backboard to start attacks. So Sporting KC’s builds tended to look like a zig-zag traveling from Mustivar to Espinoza to Feilhaber up to Dom Dwyer at the front.
From a defensive perspective, all this matters for the Sounders due to a spate of injuries that hit the team late in the year. An injury that may keep Andreas Ivanschitz out again forced a shuffle that moved Roldan out of the central midfield and pushed Erik Friberg back into the starting lineup next to Osvaldo Alonso. Considering how good Alonso and Roldan have been all year next to one another, it was hardly an ideal scenario.
The seeming return of Brad Evans from an injury layoff gives interim coach Brian Schmetzer more room to work with. Evans came on late against RSL and upheld the flank, and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see him start on Thursday. A lineup with Evans at right mid, Alvaro Fernandez on the left and Roldan-Alonso paired up wouldn’t be a bad idea. It’d get the captain back on the field and give the Sounders an easy No. 1 option off the bench in Friberg. That’s about as versatile as the Sounders can get with Ivanschitz’s iffy status.
The bottom line, though, is that the Sounders launched themselves into this position with a good performance against RSL and a string of wins stretching back to the start of August. Streaky teams tend to dominate the postseason, something the Portland Timbers proved in spades last season. If the Sounders can keep that momentum rolling, they have at least two more games in them after Thursday night.