Editor's Note: The following is the second in a three-part series recapping Sounders FC's 2015 season. You can read the first part here and the final piece will be on SoundersFC.com later this week.
June arrived in an excitable hurry for Sounders FC, hot on the heels of a lively spring that boosted the club’s Supporters' Shield hopes through the roof.
Seattle was playing the most attractive soccer in MLS, led the race for the Supporters’ Shield, boasted a healthy, in-form cadre of stars and seemed to enjoy that enviable age sweet spot between inexperienced and over the hill. So heading into an anticipated summer that seemed to hold scads of promise, the Sounders were expecting to solidify their position atop the heap and spent the warmer months building cohesion.
The three-act structure the Sounders’ season was playing out, though, demanded a point of crisis for the team to eventually rise above. And boy, did they get one.
All seasons twist and turn around different explosive waypoints, and there’s little question the oft-mentioned U.S. Open Cup loss to the Portland Timbers on June 16 was the biggest such moment of Seattle’s season. Clint Dempsey’s red card led him into national team duty, and he didn’t play again for two months, and not consistently for another three. Obafemi Martins went out with a groin injury that night and didn’t play again for two months.
Osvaldo Alonso had already missed two weeks with an injury, and it’d be another two before he was back in the lineup. The significance of that fact meant that Seattle lost two of its then-three Designated Players in one night, and its third was already out. Add to the blender that captain Brad Evans left for national team duty for a month not long after the Portland match, and absence seemed to compound absence.
But that wasn’t all. Immutably productive keeper Stefan Frei missed nearly all of July with an injury. Gonzalo Pineda, Alonso’s running partner in the middle, couldn’t stay healthy either. Marco Pappa played just 26 minutes between June 28 and Aug. 30.
As good as the spring was to the Sounders, the summer was equally destructive. With a virtual walking wounded roster limping from match to match, Seattle followed its Open Cup loss to the Timbers with consecutive league losses to the San Jose Earthquakes, the Philadelphia Union and the Timbers again. A 1-0 win against 10-man D.C. United on July 3 rescued late by a bolt of lightning from Tyrone Mears was the only life raft amid the violently swinging waves.
After that match, Seattle lost back-to-back games against the last place teams in both conferences (the Chicago Fire and Colorado Rapids), lost to the Montreal Impact in a match where they didn’t put a single shot on goal, were blasted 3-0 by the Whitecaps at home and were brushed aside by the LA Galaxy 3-1 at the StubHub Center.
The frustration had been mounting for weeks, and it seemed to bubble up to a full boil after the Galaxy match. That dropped Seattle to 1-9-1 in its last 11 games in all competitions, and without Dempsey and Martins, the team had scored four goals in that span. There is no wider tactical point to make here beyond the absence of the team’s attacking stars. Seattle scored 23 goals through its first 15 games, a span during which they went 9-4-1. During the ensuing 11-game dip, Seattle’s goals per game average dipped from 1.5 to 0.3.
There were encouraging signs in the offing that the cavalry was on its way, but it took some time to arrive.
Sounders General Manager & President of Soccer Garth Lagerwey stayed relatively quiet during his first offseason in Seattle. He preferred to assess the landscape first and defer his transfer dealings to the summer. That process accelerated when Seattle hit its speed bump, facilitating the acquisition of midfielders Thomás and Erik Friberg in June.
The biggest flurry, though, was yet to happen. On Aug. 4, Seattle announced the signing of Austrian free kick specialist Andreas Ivanschitz. Paraguayan attacker Nelson Valdez, who’d become a Designated Player to allow the team to buy down some of Alonso’s contract with TAM cash, signed three days later. On Aug. 12, the third pillar fell when Panamanian National Team captain and towering center back Román Torres signed.
Seattle’s fortunes began changing. Martins returned to the lineup on Aug. 16 against Orlando City, and he scored twice in a 4-0 romp in which Seattle out-shot Orlando 21-5. But the bigger story - the one that’d presaged bigger things in the third act - was that four of the team’s midseason signings got on the scoresheet. Valdez scored his first goal for the club, assisted by Friberg. Thomás registered an assist and the final goal, which Torres assisted in turn. Ivanschitz wasn’t yet fully healthy, but that day too was soon in coming.
The Sounders had eight games in 30 days in the month of August, the summer’s final clawing lunge at Seattle’s attempt to pull itself out of the tailspin. A 2-0 loss to Real Salt Lake on Aug. 22 sandwiched between CONCACAF Champions League games proved the team wasn’t quite out of the woods yet.
When the game against the Timbers arrived on Aug. 30, Seattle was in must-win territory. For the first time all season, the Sounders had dipped below the red line delineating playoff teams from those out of the postseason, and the Timbers’ visit just happened to come at the end of one of the most draining two and a half month runs in club history. A loss would put Seattle on even more untenable ground headed into a fall becoming more critical by the day.
What happened next on that warm late August afternoon set the tone for Seattle’s transition from a difficult act two to a triumphant act three. The nadir was ending. The climax had arrived.
