Erik Friberg could never really tear himself away from Sounders FC. Even after the midfielder left Seattle following a 2011 season that grafted him to the city’s fans, he’s seen at least a couple Sounders FC matches every year he’s been away.
A fair amount’s changed as Friberg takes his place in the Seattle midfield for the second time in his career. But not that much.
“The squad here is better than when I was here before,” Friberg said. “I’ve seen a couple games every year since I left, and it’s gotten better and better every year. Now we’re in a couple tough weeks, but you can see it’s a good team.”
There was enough familiarity around the team for Friberg to feel like he was coming home again, namely on the coaching staff. There were a few leftover players, Zach Scott and Brad Evans chief among them, but Friberg knew Head Coach Sigi Schmid and felt comfortable with the brickwork he’d put in place in the four years since he’d been gone. Philosophically speaking, Friberg and the organization still felt tethered. After all, it took Friberg less than three weeks from when he signed on June 29 to his first start, against the Colorado Rapids, on July 18.
Friberg is stepping into the side at an undeniably crucial and feverish time. Sounders FC is deep into the dog days of summer, an exacting period requiring a pricey toll for a team that led the race for the Supporter’s Shield after 14 games. Now, Sounders FC is mired in a run of six losses in seven matches across all competitions, a stretch that’s seen Seattle drop out of the race for a fifth Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup and fall to fifth in the unbelievably deep Western Conference.
Friberg’s role is still being defined in all this. Sounders FC has had little trouble organizing a competent defense, but the attack has failed to produce goals. There have been just two in the team’s last six matches. How Friberg helps bridge the gap between now and the time when Seattle gets its glut of missing starters back could be the difference between three points or another tight loss.
“It’s about scoring goals,” Friberg said. “The Chicago game, we had a good chance to score a goal there. If we score the first goal, we grab the three points. It’s the same Saturday (against Colorado), of course we should score a goal before they did, and if we do we win the game.”
Friberg, though, won’t be arrayed up top, and the onus for scoring ultimately falls on the guys topping the formation. In that sense, it’s been a tough slog since Clint Dempsey left for the Gold Cup and Obafemi Martins was stretchered off during a U.S. Open Cup match against the Portland Timbers on June 16. With Dempsey out at the CONCACAF Gold Cup and Martins only just returning to team training, the high midfielders and forwards need to find a way to bridge the gap in the interim.
Typically, teams mired in slumps are outplayed more often than not. Whether that’s for reasons of motivation or ability, losses generally pile on for a reason. That, however, has not been the case over the last six weeks for Sounders FC. In each of Seattle’s last six MLS matches, they’ve out-passed and out-possessed every team they’ve played. Even on the road, Seattle’s managed to generally control the flow of matches even without a number of first team pieces.
Flip the coin, though, and what they did with that possession wasn’t quite so dominant. In that same run, Seattle was out-shot in every match but one, the D.C. United game in which D.C. was down a man for more than an hour. Unsurprisingly, that was Seattle’s only win in that span.
Despite that, Seattle’s goal conversion rate - 15 percent of its shots are goals - is still in the league’s top 10. The problem is that its shot volume is not. Sounders FC is second-to-last in MLS with just 215 shots.
To say Seattle misses its two starting strikers would be an understatement, and to say any MLS team would struggle to replace two players who’d combined for 14 goals and 10 assists over the first two and a half months of the season is even more of one. But where Seattle goes from here and how it arrests the slide is really all that matters at this point, and to that end the coaching staff has a message: we won’t stop working.
“We’re going to keep working,” Schmid said after Saturday’s 1-0 loss to the Rapids. “We’re not going to stop working. We’re going to keep thinking about it, we’re going to keep experimenting. We tried to do a lot of crossing and finishing to build up the confidence of the guys up front. We’ll continue to try and put out what is a formation we think can help us attack.”
Friberg is hardly a goal machine, but he does provide some stability going forward to a midfield that, without Dempsey dropping in to prod possession, has struggled at times to locate the front line. There’s also his efficiency in front of goal. In 2013, he scored six goals on six shots during Malmo’s championship campaign in Sweden.
Against Colorado, a 1-0 loss in which Sounders FC owned an edge in almost every category except shots, Schmid had planned to shuffle the lineup in order to start rookie forward Andy Craven, who signed from S2 at midseason. But Craven picked up an injury in practice during the week and missed the match, forcing Schmid to go back to Lamar Neagle, who’s scored one of the team’s two goals during its last six matches.
For Friberg, the answer is to keep his head down and pick out players with well-weighted balls going forward. The team can only hope that unlocks the door that helps it escape its current run of losses.
“They bring me here because they thought I’m a good player,” Friberg said. “I’m just going to do the same that I always do. I’m going to run a lot, hopefully make good possession and hopefully get some assists on some goals.”
