Injuries and absences are interwoven into the fabric of an MLS season. Deal with those adequately and the road to an MLS Cup gets considerably less stressful.
Even by league standards, though, Sounders FC is trying to navigate unusually turbulent waters this month. And the storm hit fever pitch on Saturday.
Clint Dempsey served the first game of his three-match suspension on Saturday stemming from a Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup match against the Portland Timbers on Tuesday. Key central midfielders Gonzalo Pineda and Osvaldo Alonso are both rehabbing injuries. So is striker Obafemi Martins, whose groin injury in that same Timbers game will reportedly keep him out anywhere from three to six weeks. Oh, and backup striker Chad Barrett was out too.
Sounders FC couldn’t outrun the players it missed on Saturday, and the result was a disappointing 2-0 loss to the San Jose Earthquakes at CenturyLink Field on a resplendently sunny afternoon. The loss came on the tail end of a run in which Seattle earned three wins in its last four and climbed to the top of the Western Conference with games in hand to burn.
In many ways Saturday was the confluence of four typhoons joining into one supercell. Seattle could not possibly have lost four more critical pieces than Alonso, Pineda, Martins and Dempsey at the same time. Alonso and Pineda are the bedrock of the league’s best possession team at the base of the midfield in the team’s well-worn 4-4-2. The two are both in the top five in the league in passes per game, and Alonso is the most accurate passer in MLS by some margin. Seattle didn’t have either against San Jose.
Martins and Dempsey, meanwhile, are the tip of the most dangerous spear in the league. The two have 14 combined goals this season, the best for any forward duo in the league, and they occupy holes no team in the league could fill with selfsame pieces. Martins is the most deadly speed threat in the league, and Dempsey’s technical ability dropping deeper into the midfield is invaluable and irreplaceable. Indeed, it would be on any team in the league.
Sounders FC coach Sigi Schmid and his staff patched the holes as ably as possible. In the absence of a second forward, the team morphed from a 4-4-2 to a 4-2-3-1 and pushed Andy Rose up under lone striker Lamar Neagle. As the wide ballasts, newly acquired Brazilian midfielder Thomás and Marco Pappa were asked to support Neagle and stoke interchange wherever possible.
Seattle managed to produce a couple chances, mostly in the first half, but nothing overly troublesome for San Jose keeper David Bingham. Without Dempsey providing life-giving shocks via his deep drops into the midfield and Martins taking pressure off the wide players, the attack didn’t produce a shot on goal in the second half and only forced Bingham to make three saves.
“Pappa ended up playing a little too deep for my liking,” Sounders FC coach Sigi Schmid said. “But he was tired as well. So what we were looking for is getting those three underneath guys - Thomàs, Pappa and Rose - to be a little more offensive than they were. But I thought [Micheal] Azira and [Cristian] Roldan were pretty solid.”
The Azira-Roldan partnership in place of Alonso and Pineda was a bright sunbeam in an otherwise dreary game. This was Roldan’s first professional match at his favored center mid position, while Azira was probably Seattle’s man of the match. Even with the absences, Seattle managed to out-pass San Jose 476-349, which was largely down to Roldan and Azira calming down a team that was more direct than usual. Combined, the two fed out a competent spool of about 100 passes and completed 87 percent of them.
Importantly, only three of those giveaways were anywhere near the team’s goal. But it couldn’t paper over the losses the team felt up top.
“I think the guys up top that we normally have are very good on the ball. They help us sustain possession,” Roldan said. “When you take out those two guys, it becomes a very different game for us. I thought in the first half we had a little more possession, but towards the second we were chasing the game and we just kind of went for it and kicked the ball forward.”
Neagle did his best to impose his will on the match alone up top, but he found the sledding difficult. As more of a box-to-box player, Rose doesn’t have the same attacking proclivities as Dempsey, and Neagle isn’t typically at his best on an island. As a result, Neagle’s 25 touches were the fewest of any outfield player on the team who went all 90 minutes by 29 touches.
By the time second striker Victor Mansaray was subbed on for Andy Rose in the 77th minute, the team already trailed by two goals.
“I think when the other team sees that those guys aren’t playing, maybe they think they can press a little higher, that they don’t have to be worried about a guy like Oba’s speed or a guy like Clint’s technical ability,” defender Zach Scott said. “We’ve got to find different ways to score, then. We can’t rely on those two. We’ve got to be a little more dynamic and a little less predictable.”
The injury downpour only intensified in the afterglow of the only league match Sounders FC has lost by more than one goal this season. Brad Evans was yanked for Scott at halftime due to a niggling injury, and Rose’s substitution was precipitated by some hamstring stiffness. That would force a team already strapped for bodies even deeper into its bench.
Of course, this is simply life in a physically rigorous league like MLS, which spreads its physical demands over nearly 10 grueling months. Injuries are an inevitability. But for absences to have hit so many key players at one time? A bad day at the office.
“It’s a heavy load right now, but it’s something we’ve got to get through,” Schmid said. “We’ll fight through it.”
