SEATTLE — Jordan Morris cozied up to an in-stadium microphone Saturday in the moments after the Seattle Sounders’ manic 1-0 win over Columbus Crew SC and prepared to be interviewed inside a suddenly jovial stadium.
After all, it was Morris’ goal after a mad scramble in the box in the 88th minute that felled the Crew. It was Morris who’d just scored in his third consecutive game not three months into his rookie year. And it was Morris who saved the Sounders from a scoreless draw at home that would’ve raised far more questions than answers.
As Morris spoke to a reporter, Zach Scott quietly slipped into the tunnel and clapped in acknowledgement of the small smattering of fans giving him a hearty applause. Scott passed almost unnoticed into the locker room and off a field he made a virtual playground for 90 boisterous and thoroughly efficient minutes.
The Sounders needed this win. Teetering on the edge of a slide as May approaches, Seattle needed to bottle some measure of positivity against a fellow preseason favorite to advance deep into the playoffs this fall. For the better part of 90 minutes the game was practically begging for goal, and as it plunged toward stoppage time a draw seemed likely.
Then Morris scored, the stadium exploded and the Sounders pocketed their third win of the season.
“Three points is massive,” Seattle coach Sigi Schmid said. “We wanted to get wins at home. We have another win at home now.”
Here’s a look at three things we learned on a resplendent Saturday afternoon.
The ageless Zach Scott
Plenty of digital ink will be penned about Morris in the coming days, and most of it will be justified. After a slow rolling start to life as a Sounder, Morris has three goals in his last three matches, and this latest tally won the Sounders a game.
But don’t let that obscure a massive shutout performance from the Seattle back line, and in particular a performance out of time from Mr. Sounder himself.
Scott was thrust into a starting role at center back when Brad Evans earned a red card and a one-match ban against Colorado last weekend. Scott, who turns 36 in July, has been a stand-in of late, but his role is perhaps more pronounced because Roman Torres is still some distance from returning to the lineup.
For anyone not appraised of the the situation, it was almost impossible to tell that Scott hadn’t been starting all along.
The ageless wonder had to deal with the massively dangerous central combination of Kei Kamara and Federico Higuain, and he put in a performance that rolled back the years. He finished 36-of-42 passing and made a couple key tackles in the box. Importantly, he was a lion in a positional sense, never allowing himself to be in compromising one-on-one situations with a faster forward and a trickier creator.
Whatever the rest of the season holds for Scott, he’s rarely ever played better than this. Schmid can rest easy knowing that an in-form Mr. Sounder is in his back pocket for situations just like this one.
Lineup changes don’t bother Morris
On Saturday, Schmid rolled out his eighth different lineup in eight matches. It didn’t seem to have any effect on Morris.
Of late, Morris appeared to find his groove in Schmid’s newfangled 4-3-3 as the center forward. After beginning the year as the right-sided winger, Morris found some joy as the middle prong of the trident in a 2-1 win over the Union and a 3-1 loss to Colorado. In both games, Morris scored run-of-play goals in two different ways, both running under a long ball and creating space for himself in the box.
He scored in a third on Saturday when he redirected a blocked Oalex Anderson shot inside the six with mere minutes left in the match. It wasn’t the prettiest goal of his career, but it was probably the biggest. And he did it after ostensibly playing two different positions at various times in one game.
Schmid’s formation on Saturday vacillated between a 4-4-2 and a 4-3-3, assuming a smoke-like quality that allowed it to bounce between both as the need arose. Clint Dempsey played higher than he has in the past, and Morris essentially rotated around him as Dempsey moved. Morris eventually played in almost every sector of the attacking third, hopping from one slice of the field to the next to find the game.
More often than not, though, he settled centrally. As you can see from his touch map from Saturday, Morris did a bit of everything.
Players tend to settle into whatever furrows they find most comfortable, regardless of where they’ve been deployed. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that deploying Morris on the wing won’t keep him from finding space in the middle.
Does possession matter?
Schmid made headlines after the Colorado Rapids loss by stating matter-of-factly that “possession doesn’t mean anything.” That echoes with comments he’s made in the past about valuing the product in the final third - finishing, chance creation and chance taking - over the product in the build-up. This, in many ways, is vintage Schmid. Not at all surprising.
But it’s worth pointing out the split in halves that led Seattle to the win was splintered right down the middle by the amount of possession. It did matter to some degree on Saturday.
Columbus perhaps didn’t totally dominate the opening 45 minutes, but they certainly controlled the half. They owned 57 percent of the ball and missed on a couple key chances, namely an Ethan Finlay breakaway and a Higuain chance off a flubbed Stefan Frei clearance that Higuain pumped back into Frei’s grateful arms. The possession was there. The chances were there. The goals were not.
The script flipped in the second half. The Sounders owned 59 percent possession and out-shot Columbus 6-1 on target over the final 45 minutes. The first five led to naught. The sixth was the goal that won Seattle all three points.
Perhaps possession doesn’t matter in the way Schmid means, and meaningful chance creation is certainly a more important indicator of your success than whether you can ping it around the back for an entire game without doing anything of note in the final third. And in the sense that Barcelona and Bayern Munich have some of the best players in the world, they do have a notably advantage in playing that way.
But it was clear during the second half - which has a legitimate shout as the Sounders’ most coherently played half of the entire season in an attacking sense - that when Seattle is good in front of goal it invariably owns the flow of the game. And that means winning the possession battle to both get yourself in lethal positions and to deny the opposing attack the oxygen to operate.
Perhaps possession is a useful tool as a kind of lens through which to view the rest of the match. Whatever your take, Seattle’s second half was far better than its first.
Seattle now kicks into a stretch of four of six away from CenturyLink Field, and it will not be easy. Three of those are on the team’s customary East Coast swing, while they’ll have to face Supporters’ Shield frontrunners FC Dallas in Frisco. But if this match was any wider indication of the play to come, Seattle can rest easy this week.
The immediate future suddenly looks significantly brighter.
