SEATTLE — The Seattle Sounders have been chasing the imaginary Major League Soccer playoff line all season. For the first 29 games of the season, Seattle sat beneath it, starting slow then clawing back only to be tantalizingly denied yet again.
On Wednesday night, with just four matches remaining, they finally caught it.
The Sounders defeated the Chicago Fire 1-0 at CenturyLink Field behind Chad Marshall’s fourth goal of the season and now occupy the Western Conference's sixth and final playoff spot. Seattle has won three games on the trot for just the second time all season and has usurped Cascadia rival Portland, a possibility that two months ago seemed implausible.
When the organization parted ways with Sigi Schmid and named assistant Brian Schmetzer as interim head coach, the team was in the conference basement, flirting dangerously with the distinction of becoming the first Sounders team in eight years on the MLS map not to reach to postseason.
But then something switched. Nicolas Lodeiro joined the team. Jordan Morris broke out of his shell for good. The team grinded out results after falling behind early in games and has gone 6-1-3 at the most crucial point of the season.
In Seattle’s last 10 matches, the team has bagged 21 points — one more than it had in the first 20 matches of the season.
“Give them all the credit,” Schmetzer said of his players. “That is a committed group. From the day I took over, they’ve given me everything. They’ve given everything for themselves. They truly believe that they have ownership of the team.”
Said Marshall: “When the organization made the move that we did with where we were at, everyone in here believed that we could still get it done. The last few months have been promising and we’re happy to be moving up. We’ve got another big one on Sunday.”
The Sounders turn their attention now to their third match in eight days for a road tilt against the Vancouver Whitecaps, a team the Sounders defeated in Seattle two weeks ago. The Whitecaps have just one win in their last 11 games and have fallen six points off the postseason pace since July 16, two weeks before the Sounders began their resurrection.
The Sounders, though, will have to try and earn points without playmaker Lodeiro, who will miss the match with a yellow-card suspension after being booked for the fifth time in 10 games on Wednesday night.
But Seattle doesn’t care which players it throws out — the wins have kept on coming. Captain Brad Evans has missed the last four matches with lower back and calf injuries. And on Tuesday, the Sounders announced they’d be shutting down Dempsey for the rest of the year while he undergoes treatment for an irregular heartbeat.
It’s next-man-up mentality for the Sounders, and the belief is palpable.
“We’ve gotten more comfortable defending now,” said goalkeeper Stefan Frei. “It shows toward the end of games.
“We’re a bit more mature,” he continued. “Earlier in the season, we would go up a goal and we would shrink in confidence and get worried. I sense the opposite now. We grow and we see that, “O.K., we can get another one.’ We’re in control of the game.”
They’re also in control of their own destiny. Seattle has the league’s fourth-easiest strength of schedule for the rest of the season and still has a game in hand on Sporting Kansas City and the Timbers, but the real push for the postseason begins now.
“I have not been looking at the standings for the whole season because when you’re losing games, you know where you find yourselves,” Frei said. “It’s nice to know that we’re stringing together results…By no means can we let off the pedal at this point.”
