Your opinion on the Sounders’ season opening performance largely depends on which half of the match we’re talking about.
The first 45 minutes of the Sounders’ 2017 title defense season were not exactly ideal. They were out-shot by a 12-2 margin in Houston and found themselves trailing 2-0 into their first halftime interval of the season. The second 45, though, was markedly different. Seattle bossed most of the rest of the match, punctuating that passage of play with a timely Clint Dempsey poacher’s effort at the far post. It was warming to see Dempsey back on the scoresheet, but even more so to see him reel the team back into the match.
That, unfortunately, was the end of the goals. The Sounders’ comeback effort fell short, and the Dynamo came out 2-1 winners, leaving us with a mixed bag in its wake.
There are of course two ways to take that headed into the Sounders’ second match of the season in Montreal this weekend. The first is that the team needed some time to reacquaint itself with Dempsey, and vice versa. When Dempsey’s rolling, as was the case in the second half, it seems like the entire match - on both sides - rotates around him like planets around the sun. When he’s not, as was the case in the first half, the sledding is difficult.
The second is that the reacquainting period only took about 45 minutes.
This is the reality of March in MLS. Most of the time the preseason is given over to younger guys looking to crack into the lineup, and match fitness is rarely at optimal levels until a few months into the season. And the Sounders, a veteran unit to their core, have a history of knowing when to flip on the afterburners. Incredibly enough, the Sounders are 15-3-6 in the months of September, October, November and December over the past two seasons.
So needless to say, there will be no panic in Montreal on Saturday. Not by half.
What to expect on the field from the Sounders’ point of view isn’t much of a mystery. The core of the starting XI should largely remain the same, with the three-across line of Alvaro Fernandez, Dempsey and Nicolas Lodeiro providing the creative impetus underneath Jordan Morris. And dislodging the Cristian Roldan-Osvaldo Alonso partnership at this point in the game seems almost unthinkable. The biggest hinge point is perhaps whether Gustav Svensson gets another run-out at right back, but the Impact don’t exactly have a turbo-charged Romell Quioto-type winger to run the channels and catch him outside his ramparts as Houston did. Ignacio Piatti may be one of the league’s best players, but at the very least Svensson can keep him in front.
What Montreal does is probably just as expected, if not more difficult, to stop.
When you think of how the Impact build their attacks, think of it like a paper fan with its root deep in the midfield. Montreal routes most of its most dangerous moments through Piatti along the left channel, but it also likes to find Dominic Oduro on the right. To do this, Montreal coach Mauro Biello uses a three-man central midfield of Hernan Bernardello, Patrice Bernier and Marco Donadel to spray the attack up and out.
Montreal hits hard and quick, and they attempt to catch you napping to exploit space in behind. All they need is a crack of daylight.
We need to of course focus the spotlight on Piatti a bit more, because I think San Jose did as good a job at quieting his typically noisy contributions last weekend in their 1-0 win as I’ve seen. And if Seattle plans on at least slowing him down on Saturday, they’ll need to frequently roll Alonso over to help with his ever-present danger.
Piatti is a central No. 10 at heart, but in Biello’s system he operates as sort of an inside-out creator. He’s good on the cross, of course, but ideally he’d like to pull inside and find his targets - mostly forward Matteo Mancosu - at short range. San Jose largely denied him that oxygen, pushing him out of the central channel with the combined efforts of Anibal Godoy and Fatai Alashe.
This is what Piatti’s passing matrix ultimately looked like. Note how few he even attempted centrally. He ultimately completed fewer than 50 percent of these, and didn’t tie together a single successful pass within 30 yards of the box.
Stopping Piatti is a difficult and unpredictable business, but this is the crux of it. You’ll notice on Saturday that Alonso will frequently roll coverage to that side of the field to deal with the threat, which is especially present because Svensson isn’t a natural fullback. So long as the Sounders can keep him from driving the sideline and finding areas to cut inside, they too can keep him on a short leash.
As far as the Sounders are concerned, possession is there to be had. Montreal attempted fewer than 400 passes against San Jose and completed fewer than 70 percent of those (fair warning they also played 24 minutes on 10 men), which tells you the Impact like to take shots downfield and they don’t take much time on possession. The Sounders can and probably will monopolize time on the ball.
They key is using the overlapping Dempsey-Lodeiro brain trust in the middle of the field to create incisive chances for Morris that weren’t always there with much regularity in Houston. If they can do that, Saturday’s match will much more closely resemble last weekend’s second half rather than its first.