The Seattle Sounders’ history with Sporting Kansas City in 2016 is a maudlin tale told in two wildly different vignettes.
The first story is weaved through a cool evening in March underneath skies that threatened and then delivered on a downpour. It was the first day of the season, and the Sounders had just lost Obafemi Martins to China. While they attempted to figure out a way forward without him, Sporting KC came to town to open the season.
The match went off the rails when Oniel Fisher earned a red card just before halftime. With the new turf slick from the rain - the team had only played one competitive match on it before opening day - a speculative shot from 30 yards skipped off the ground and past a diving Stefan Frei. An anomaly, but the game ended 1-0 all the same.
The second vignette came months later, on July 24, halfway across the country in steamy Kansas City. Amidst punishingly searing temperatures, the Sounders put in arguably their worst performance in franchise history. They came mere minutes from becoming the first team in MLS history to go an entire 90-minute match without registering a single shot, either on or off target. Even then, it was only one, a Joevin Jones effort that went 10 yards wide of the post. Days later, longtime coach Sigi Schmid’s tenure in Seattle was over.
And now, Sporting KC comes to town Thursday for a do-or-die Knockout Round meet-up at CenturyLink Field (7 p.m.; FS1/UniMas/KIRO 97.3 FM/El Rey 1360AM). It’ll be the last meeting between the teams this year, and what happens next - if the Sounders win - is entirely dependent on what happens in Wednesday’s Real Salt Lake-LA Galaxy game.
But don’t fall into the trap of conflating the game to come with the two that’ve already happened this year. Because Sporting KC’s two wins over the Sounders this year may as well have happened in the Paleolithic Age.
To put it as simply as possible, they have no bearing on Thursday’s events.
For one, the first matchup came on the initial day of the regular season. That day, the Sounders started Jordan Morris as a right winger, Clint Dempsey as a left winger, Brad Evans as a center back and Oniel Fisher as a right back. Morris moved to full-time striker a few weeks later, Dempsey is out for the season, Evans was replaced by Roman Torres in September and Fisher has had a grand total of one start since that game. Not to mention the holistic switch from Schmid’s 4-3-3 to interim coach Brian Schmetzer’s 4-2-3-1.
What’s more, the Sounders played nearly 45 minutes down a man.
As for the second game between the two? Where to even start. The stats might be a good place, although trigger warning: these might cause dizziness and lack of spacial awareness.
Perhaps the most notable thing about the Sounders that day - aside from ostensibly playing inside a blast furnace - was that they lacked a suspended Osvaldo Alonso. The Sounders are 0-13-3 without Alonso on the road, and unsurprisingly they looked bereft of ideas. That wasn’t the entirety of the issue, but it helps explain some of it.
Beyond that, this game came days before Nicolas Lodeiro arrived in town for the first time, nearly two months before Torres returned from injury and before Schmetzer galvanized the locker room. Since the start of August those have been the Sounders’ two best players, bar none, and Schmetzer’s steady hand has been invaluable. Whatever Sporting KC was able to do against Seattle earlier in the year, it hasn’t faced either in person. And the prospect of squaring up Lodeiro in particular should fill them with at least some small sense of dread.
As it’s constructed, Sporting KC will probably sit in a bit and let the Sounders come to them, which is a totally different look from the battles these two teams played earlier in the year. In the first, the Sounders were forced on their heels by a red card that turned the game into 11 vs. 10. In the second, the Sounders limped into that game on a poor run of form and played so poorly it’s fair to wonder if that nadir will ever be equalled again in franchise history.
Sporting KC can expect a vastly different Sounders team this time around. We’ll soon see if it’s good enough to push the Sounders into the Western Conference Semifinals for the eighth consecutive season.
