The final whistle blew from the center circle on Wednesday night, and Vancouver Whitecaps FC Head Coach Carl Robinson immediately wheeled toward the Sounders FC bench and marched down the sideline. As soon Robinson met his Seattle counterpart Sigi Schmid at midfield, he offered the most obvious observation he could muster.
Another 3-0 loss to Seattle?
“That seemed like déjà vu,” Robinson said.
Indeed it did.
Just four days after dismantling the Whitecaps 3-0 at BC Place to capture the Cascadia Cup for the first time in four years, the Sounders did it again on Wednesday in their final Group F match in the CONCACAF Champions League group stage. The resounding 3-0 win guaranteed Seattle the group despite the fact that CD Olimpia and Vancouver still have a game to play in Honduras next month.
The Sounders will now await their opponent in the quarterfinal stage of the tournament, which is based off a calculation of total points from the group stage. That won’t be set until the last group matches cross the finish line in October, and then there’s a CONCACAF draw to determine who comes next. The competition resumes in February.
As for Wednesday, Seattle exploded after a spotty opening half hour with a tidy finish from Lamar Neagle off a feed from Chad Barrett in the 32nd minute and a Nelson Valdez header from a Marco Pappa cross in the 39th. Seattle polished off the rout in the 47th, when Neagle smashed home a beautifully worked three-player sequence involving familiar customers Barrett and Valdez. Seattle practically coasted home from there with little danger.
For Neagle, who didn’t travel to Vancouver for last Saturday’s game, the performance was particularly satisfying.
“After having nine goals last year and not really having nine goals this year yet, it’s nice to get two in a game, and especially in a game that’s important like this one,” said Neagle, who now has six goals in all competitions this season. “Especially after we went up there and I wasn’t able to go to Vancouver, and we were able to score three goals against them. So to do the exact same thing against them is nice to be able to do at home.”
The victory pushed Seattle into the knockout round of the competition for the third time in Seattle’s four appearances here. And they got there on Wednesday with as much concussive force as ever.
The taste of this week’s feast is even sweeter from Seattle’s perspective given the fire it had to ride through this summer, when it won just once in a stretch of 10 games. But the ship’s been tacking with the wind instead of into it over the past month, and Wednesday was the clearest indication that things have changed.
“It’s just good,” Schmid said. “The thing we talked about right before the game was, ‘hey, we’re in a rhythm, we’re starting to get a rhythm, we’re starting to win games, confidence is growing.’ This is just another game in that step, in that sequence. We didn’t want to say that this was a different competition. We’re talking about sequencing ourselves, making sure that we build our confidence level and continue to win games.”
In the sense that this was a sequence, the lineup practically screamed consistency from from CenturyLink Field’s rooftop. Four Sounders players who started against Vancouver on Saturday played again Wednesday, as opposed to just one - central defender Pa-Modou Kah - for the Whitecaps. All four were arrayed at the back: Tyrone Mears, Chad Marshall and Brad Evans on the back line and Stefan Frei between the pipes. Evans, in a sign of his versatility, moved back from right mid to star at centerback on Wednesday.
The returns were stirring.
Vancouver finished with six total shots and forced Frei to make just two saves. The depth the team tried so hard to cultivate in the summer with its flurry of signings is finally coming to bear. Need a sign as to how much? Valdez, a Designated Player, went 74 minutes in a midweek game.
Schmid even had enough available depth to put star striker Obafemi Martins on the bench as a final bulwark if the game went down to the wire. It did not.
“Once Lamar got the third goal, I told (Martins), ‘Don’t even warm up,’” Schmid said.
It was that kind of night for the Sounders, who reached into their deepening bag of tricks and pulled out yet another massive victory. The success of the Cristian Roldan-Erik Friberg central midfield practically governed the entire flow of the game, and the Barrett-Valdez partnership was practically impossible to guard from Vancouver’s perspective.
They owned the flow of the game in the stage’s most critical junctures, taking a 61-percent edge in possession and a 2-0 lead into the halftime break. That carried through Seattle’s third goal just after halftime, when Vancouver tried - quite unsuccessfully - to reverse the course of the match. Seattle still finished with 56.6 percent possession, and Vancouver’s attack looked disjointed and out of sync for the duration.
A team with this many veterans - Seattle’s average age in this match was around 29 - is well aware of the realities of coming together at the right time of the season.
If anything, the last week provided pristine proof of that.
“We’re on a little bit of a roll and we want to keep that going,” Neagle said. “We don’t want to jinx ourselves or anything like that. But we’re working hard. All my teammates are working hard. We’re starting to click and it’s at the perfect time.”
