Editor's Note: The following is the third and final piece in a three-part series recapping Sounders FC's 2015 season. You can read the first part here and the second part here.
The losing skid that sent Sounders FC to the depths of despair in the summer of discontent started with the Portland Timbers. So it was fitting that it ultimately ended there, too.
For most of June, all of July and most of August, Seattle stalked through an 1-9-1 run that sent them to the brink of playoff extinction. After such an established first act through May, the summer’s second act was a brutal trip through the meat of a Shakespearian tragedy. Injuries piled on absences and by the end of August, the team was searching desperately for a way to arrest the slide.
Manna fell from the sky in the form of the Timbers.
There had been signs that the third act was readying for takeoff, but Seattle’s 4-0 triumph over Orlando on Aug. 16 was something of a false dawn. The win over Portland, though, was a definitive point of embarkation for Seattle’s unstoppable final push into the postseason. Weeks after finishing a run of just one win in 11 games, the Portland match began an 11 game unbeaten run in which the team went 7-0-4.
That took them through all of September and all of October without suffering a single loss in any competition, and witnessed Seattle capturing the Cascadia Cup for the first time since 2011 and a spot in the CONCACAF Champions League quarterfinals within a week of each other.
Not bad for a team looking for any opportunity to end weeks of futility.
At least in the attacking third, the difference down the stretch was simple attacking arithmetic. Seattle scored 44 goals in 2015. Clint Dempsey and Obafemi Martins combined for 25 of those, a percentage of more than half. From Sept. 5 until the end of the season, Dempsey and Martins started 10 games together as an attacking duo, an honor they hadn’t shared once since the 2-1 win over the New York Red Bulls on May 31.
That kind of missing stability helped the midfield find a rhythm even as its pieces jumbled through continual waves of injury, and it helped too that the anticipated additions of Andreas Ivanschitz and Nelson Valdez were both rousing successes. Both scored vital goals on their starting debuts, and despite some intermittent injury woes, they both managed to finish the season with goals in the playoffs.
The broader question is: why? How did Seattle manage, with a handful of midseason acquisitions needing integration, to abruptly reverse course in the middle of the process and reinvent itself for a postseason push?
In short, Seattle shifted - quite on the fly - from the league’s most patient attack to one of its most quietly lethal on counters and breaks. They essentially went from possession-styled Tiki Taka to Jurgen Klopp’s heavy metal Gegenpressing in the span of a few months.
By the time May ended, Seattle was a confident possession team averaging well north of 500 passes per game. In fact, over one three-game stretch in late May that tally was well over 600. But then the summer blues hit and straits got significantly more dire. On the other side of that slide, the Sounders had a raft of new personnel all seeming to point toward a more direct style. Erik Friberg is more end to end than Gonzalo Pineda, Ivanschitz has crack aim on deep balls on the counter, Valdez is excellent in the air and on second knock-down balls.
Whether it was a concerted effort or not, under head coach Sigi Schmid the Sounders began looking to break more quickly over the final third of the season, and it worked spectacularly. Even more short pass-oriented players like Pineda got the message. This is a comment of his from early October, when the new style was fully underway.
“Sometimes yes, we want to play the possession game everyone is talking about,” Pineda said. “But also at the same time, we want to play forward quickly to Oba and Clint so they can create the goals they do up front. It’s a little mix of that.”
It was not so long before this that the second note would not have followed so closely behind the first.
The initiative really found its wings in the 2-1 win over the Timbers on Aug. 30 to start the unbeaten streak that would take Seattle all the way through its Western Conference semifinals exit against FC Dallas. Seattle attempted 407 passes that day at a clip of 73.5 percent. Of those, 18.2 percent were long passes, well over the team’s average from earlier in the season.
It was not the prettiest game Seattle had played, but it was among its most effective. Behind a roster that had finally begun healing, Seattle was lethal on quick-fire breaks. It was all Portland could do to stop the unexpected waves rolling onto their bow one after another. It was a feeling a handful of teams were about to experience in equal measure over the following months.
That helped break the interminable hex that seemed to hover over Seattle’s attacking presence in the summer. Seattle had not been great in the final third despite a defense that remained a rock all season, and it showed. Now, things were different.
Under this more direct style in Schmid’s tried and true 4-4-2 shallow bucket, the Sounders very literally could not lose. They rescued a 1-1 draw against the Earthquakes on Sept. 12 in a game that saw Román Torres suffer a devastating season-ending knee injury. They beat the Western Conference-leading Whitecaps a combined 6-0 in games separated by four days. They drew Sporting Kansas City away, trounced Real Salt Lake 3-1 on the final day of the regular season, scored three in a Knockout Round win over the LA Galaxy.
It also helped Seattle get two goals in the first leg against FC Dallas, each of which came on quick-hit attacks that Ivanschitz and Dempsey scored after minimal build-up. It was only in the second leg that the initiative finally ran out of gas, when the youthful FC Dallas midfield pushed Seattle to the brink only to win in penalties. But it wasn’t a failing of the quick-strike attack. A header from Chad Marshall on one of the team’s only corners helped get them to the doorstep. They just couldn’t cross the threshold.
And that’s where the Sounders’ third and final act of 2015 ended, the curtain falling on a season Schmid would soon call one of the strangest he’d ever experienced in his long coaching career. Between the biblical flood of injuries, the wild swings in momentum and tenor, the unfettered versatility and everything else, Seattle’s year seemed to defy any sort of wider logic.
If Seattle’s final third of the season did anything, it only fanned the flame for a 2016 season that can’t get here any quicker.
