Seconds after the whistle blew for full time on Sunday, nearly the entire Sporting KC lineup dropped to the field in sheer exhaustion. Sporting KC coach Peter Vermes started five players for the first time on Sunday, and all eight of the team’s highest earning players sat out the start of the game due to injury, card accumulation or for rest.
So the end of Sunday afternoon’s 1-1 draw between Seattle and SKC meant two vastly different things to both teams.
For Sporting KC, it meant a vital salvaged point without Graham Zusi, Benny Feilhaber, Matt Besler, Roger Espinoza and more. For the Sounders, however, the disappointment was a bit more palpable. After Obafemi Martins gave Seattle a 1-0 lead in the 32nd minute, the game gradually tailed away from them until late substitute Dom Dwyer slid home the equalizer in the 79th minute.
Those exhausted Sporting KC players, many of them reserves, might’ve felt like they earned that point, if not more playing time. And while the Sounders ran their unbeaten streak to six games with arguably their strongest lineup in months, three points would’ve felt better.
“I think probably on paper, a draw away is not bad,” said veteran central midfielder Gonzalo Pineda, whose inch-perfect through ball led in Martins for Seattle’s only goal. “But just with the way we played in the first half, it’s a little disappointing. I think we created some chances and played a good positional game, but at the end of the day we only have one point. And that’s disappointing.”
That, Sounders head coach Sigi Schmid asserted, might’ve had something to do with the off-kilter week. They trounced the Vancouver Whitecaps 3-0 on Wednesday to advance out of Group F in the CONCACAF Champions League, but that also meant the team was only afforded a single training day between then and Sunday’s match.
What’s more, that one training session didn’t include goalkeepers.
“It’s a tough week because for us, with the game we had at midweek, we had one training session,” Schmid said. “Our goalkeepers were beat up. Our reserve team was playing, so we had to have a session without goalkeepers. That’s not always the best session, the guys don’t like that. And then we had a travel day when we couldn’t train. It got us out of rhythm a little bit.”
The first half was far more coherent than the second for the Sounders, who started summer signings Andreas Ivanschitz and Nelson Valdez together on the flanks for the first time, and a front line featuring a healthy Clint Dempsey and Martins. And the first half bore that out, as Seattle controlled just about every discernible metric.
But when Sporting KC ramped up the pressure after half and forced a more defense-minded Sounders team to cope with it, Seattle struggled.
Dwyer’s late goal would’ve been nullified had a few chances bounced differently. Dempsey missed on two run-of-play opportunities from either flank in the second half, one off a cross from Valdez on the right and another from Martins on the left. Sporting KC goalkeeper Jon Kempin stonewalled Dempsey’s point-blank effort on the first try, and Dempsey couldn’t quite wrap his foot around Martins’ cross with just five minutes left to play on the second.
The chances weren’t many - Seattle only put three shots on target - but they were there. The Sounders just narrowly missed converting them.
“Obviously we felt that we could get three points out of here,” Schmid said. “We were close to it. It wasn’t meant to be.”
Pineda couldn’t remember Soni Mustivar’s name after the match, but he certainly recalled his number, and more to the point, he remembered in vivid detail Mustivar’s effect on the game.
The defensive midfielder came on at halftime for veteran Paulo Nagamura, who’d been overrun over the open 45 minutes and had a yellow card by halftime. Desperate to spark his largely second team’s flagging resolve, Sporting KC coach Peter Vermes injected Mustivar into the match, and suddenly Sporting KC’s central midfield was all over Seattle, and the game gradually began to shift in the hosts’ direction.
Goalkeeper Stefan Frei, who enjoyed yet another imperious game between the pipes, suggested that the sludgy 80-degree heat “zapped our energy level a little bit and made it difficult.” But the impact of Vermes’ subs certainly played its part.
The most pronounced shift between Nagamura and Mustivar was the pressure in the central midfield. Nagamura only even attempted 11 passes in Seattle’s half which Mustivar attempted 23 and only missed four.
That consistent pressure over the final 45 forced Seattle’s central defensive pairing of Zach Scott and Brad Evans to keep a continuously burning watchfire for threats. When Dwyer finally doused it with 80 minutes remaining, Seattle’s overloaded middle could only look at Mustivar’s purring engine as a primary culprit.
“They kind of overwhelmed us a little bit in the middle,” Pineda said. “That created for them better space to play and move. I think we never could resolve that issue.”
The result is hardly catastrophic for the Sounders, and the point kept a level of stasis in the Western Conference. It disallowed SKC from leaping above Seattle in the standings, as the Sounders still has a one-point edge on SKC with three regular season games to go. San Jose’s late winner over Real Salt Lake on Sunday tightened the screws on the playoff chase, and Seattle holds just a three-point edge on the last team currently outside the playoffs. The last few weeks of the season remain as intriguing as ever.
Still, there was a general sense on Sunday that as nice as a road point was, the Sounders left two behind.
“It’s a result on the road, but I think we’re all a bit disappointed because we put in a really good first half and had our chance to put them away in the second half, probably,” Frei said. “Good effort. I think a better effort for us, and so that’s why we’re a bit disappointed with just one point. But still, keeps the train rolling, keeps the points coming in, and we have to focus on the next one.”
