Chad Marshall’s selection to the MLS Team of the Week on Tuesday might’ve been the quietest accolade he’s ever received.
It isn’t because of his performance itself, or a weaker matchup, or any factor that directly involved Marshall at all. It was simply because, as Seattle has come to know over the past three weeks, Nicolás Lodeiro is one of the loudest talents MLS has seen in recent years. Even sonatas can be washed out by the beautiful noise he generates.
Lodeiro made the MLS Team of the Week bench, but one got the feeling it was merely to let someone else have a chance. After all, Lodeiro scored and registered an assist in a 2-1 win over Real Salt Lake on Sunday and had made the TOTW two weeks running. Nobody’s spotlight in the league is brighter right now.
So it was perhaps all too easy to overlook Marshall and, for that matter, all of his defensive comrades. With a few very brief exceptions, they’ve been the unsung heroes of the team’s abrupt reversal from Western Conference bottom-feeders to arguably the hottest team in MLS.
The Sounders have been built, like most teams who challenge for MLS Cups and win silverware, from the back to the front. Under coach Sigi Schmid, the club always went out of its way to collect ‘keepers and center backs and fullbacks in the same breath as they track game-changing attackers like Fredy Montero, Obafemi Martins and Clint Dempsey. As much as players like Dempsey draw fans with acrobatic goals, players like Marshall and goalkeeper Stefan Frei form the basis for postseason runs.
The defense was never bad this year in so many words, but it was wildly inconsistent. At its worst, in June and July, the Sounders gave up 17 goals in 11 games in a stretch where they were 2-8-1. But the defense was visibly sagging under the weight of an attack that could hang onto the ball but could not produce many meaningful opportunities. In those 11 games, the Sounders were shut out a staggering six times.
This naturally put more pressure on the back line, which has fairly consistently been Joevin Jones, Marshall, Brad Evans and Tyrone Mears. All four have had their hiccups, but each could lay claim to having a positive individual season in one respect or another.
And then the Sporting Kansas City match happened, and everything changed.
Seattle’s disastrous 3-0 result in Kansas City on July 24 was the last gasp for Schmid, who left the club in interim Brian Schmetzer’s hands afterward. For most of the season, Schmid was fond of the three-man midfield of Cristian Roldan, Osvaldo Alonso and Erik Friberg, who rotated in and out of position in a somewhat confusing positional morass.
This is what the Starting XI looked like in terms of average positioning in the 1-0 loss against the LA Galaxy on July 9 with all three central midfielders playing.
This is neither compact nor spaced particularly well where Friberg (8), Alonso (6) and Roldan (7) are concerned. Roldan drifted too high and too wide for what he does well, while Friberg and Alonso were practically stepping on top of one another in the middle. Meanwhile, there was a lot of space in behind for exploitation, which is precisely how the Galaxy got their only goal. It happened to be the match-winner.
Now look at the formation in the comfortable 3-1 win over Orlando City on Aug. 7. It has flipped to a fairly standard 4-2-3-1 with Roldan and Alonso sitting in front of the back line in lieu of the previous confused three-headed hydra.
That, my friends, is a spine.
Alonso is clearly the holder now, but he has linkage both at his back and to his front. Roldan is staying home more often, and Lodeiro (10) pinches in from the right to provide a conduit between Dempsey (2) and Jordan Morris (13). Between that and Evans (3) who pulls in behind Alonso to provide a backward avenue, the Sounders can move the ball up the gut as well as any team in the league right now.
This has all taken a tremendous amount of pressure off Seattle’s back line, which has not seen a single round number next to Seattle’s name on the scoreboard since Lodeiro arrived. Indeed, even the three goals they’ve given up in the last three games were all anomalous mental miscues that weren’t systemic issues. A miscommunication against LA, a slip-up on a corner kick against Orlando, a once-in-a-lifetime gaffe against RSL.
They were simple mistakes, each of them, capable of being ironed out on a good practice day.
The point is that the Sounders are and perhaps always have been much better than their record this season. The talent was there, but for a multitude of reasons the ends didn’t meet.
Lodeiro may have allowed that to happen, but don’t take your eyes off the defense when Seattle hosts Portland this weekend. Because they’ve certainly upheld their end of the bargain in dragging the Sounders back to the fringe of the playoff discussion.
