Following a three-day weekend, Sounders FC returned to training on Monday at Starfire Sports. The club is preparing this week for its next postseason opponent, a familiar but formidable LA Galaxy side that battled with Seattle for the Supporters’ Shield up until the final match of the regular season.
The 2014 MLS Western Conference Championship featuring Seattle and LA commences this Sunday at the StubHub Center, with a national broadcast on ESPN. Each team will have had close to two weeks off between rounds, and Head Coach Sigi Schmid said the Sounders haven’t started focusing on their game plan for the First Leg just yet.
“You don’t want to spend two weeks of psychological build up in your mind up until the game,” Schmid said. “So we wanted to train, play some soccer, and concentrate on our soccer. Our focus is to make sure we’re playing well, and we’ll start thinking about the Galaxy as this week moves on. It’s more important that we execute and we do well.”
LA is the team Seattle faced in its only other appearance in the Conference Championship. Two years ago, the fourth-seeded Galaxy won, 4-2, on aggregate over third-seeded Seattle to advance to the 2012 MLS Cup Final.
The Sounders are a much different team than they were in 2012, and they proved that by defeating LA in last month’s regular-season finale to clinch their first Supporters’ Shield.
While Seattle has yet to win a Conference Championship, there is plenty of postseason experience among the new faces on this year’s squad. First-year Sounders Chad Marshall and Chad Barrett were each part of teams that won the Supporters’ Shield and MLS Cup in the same year, Marshall with Columbus Crew in 2008 and Barrett with LA in 2011. Schmid has accomplished that feat twice, first with the Galaxy in 2002 and then in Columbus with Marshall.
With that veteran leadership combined with a core group that has been with the club since it entered MLS in 2009, Seattle has the experience needed to reach the MLS Cup Final for the first time.
“As a group, we talked about having more grit, having more determination,” Schmid said of this year’s team. “I think adding players who have the experience of winning an MLS Cup, adding those guys who are experienced players, who have been around the league, knew what it takes, who were good pros in terms of even if they weren’t in the first team, they were going to train hard – I think all of those things helped.”
Winning the Shield and MLS Cup in the same year has been a rare feat — just two teams have done so in the past 11 years — and the Sounders are three matches away from doing something even rarer. Schmid says the treble of a Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup, Supporters’ Shield, and MLS Cup has been the goal since he started coaching Seattle in 2009.
“We always strive for the same goals, and this year we’ve been able to keep our focus and go forward with it,” Schmid said. “Guys have fulfilled their roles and bought in, and it has been a good year because of that.”
