There are few American soccer players who’ve ever occupied space inside the six-yard box better than Chris Wondolowski.
Whether or not that skill is fundamentally impressive to you is another matter entirely.
The mere idea of a dedicated space explorer in American soccer triggers impatient warning signs. We are nothing if not a nation of straight line movement, of pace, of directness.
In Germany, Thomas Müller is affectionately known as Der Raumdeuter, or “the space investigator.” Müller is hardly the most technically efficient player on the field, but he is so spatially savvy that it never much matters what he’s doing, but rather where he is. This dedication to space exploitation is how he scores almost all of his goals.
This kind of tactical role from a single player requires time and patience, and more importantly it requires a player with preternatural instincts around the net. Wondolowski might not be of Müller’s quality, but he’s the closest thing American soccer has ever had.
Don’t look now, but as Wondolowski and San Jose come to town for a Western Conference vs. the Seattle Sounders clash on Saturday (7 p.m. PT; Q13 FOX/Univision-Seattle/KIRO 97.3 FM/El Rey 1360AM), Seattle’s own Jordan Morris is beginning to investigate some space of his own.
Wondolowski’s goals and the movement surrounding them have an unerring style about them, almost a numbing quality that seems to lull defenders into a false sense of security. Before the ball arrives Wondolowski never looks particularly dangerous; he’s subtly shifting his weight into space, or lightly jogging between center backs. But that’s the eye of the hurricane, and by the time the ball arrives Wondolowski is already clear of his marker and one-on-one with the keeper for a tap-in. He’s already done the hard work, so the goal never looks particularly impressive.
And yet it is that precise nonchalance that serves as the table setting for nearly all of his goals. If you call Müller Der Raumdeuter, then perhaps Wondolowski is The Iceberg. Most of his game happens under the surface, before the ball even arrives.
Morris and Wondolowski are entirely different players from a physical standpoint. Wondolowski has never had Morris’s off-ball quicks, and he’s relied on his instincts as much as he has his flat-out speed in beating a defender for the length of his career. The idea that he’d ever be deployed as a winger in a 4-3-3 as Morris has this season as anything other than a last-gasp measure is frankly a bit comical.
But the two have more in common than you might imagine. A fair bit more, actually.
Morris has been a striker for the majority of his career, and in college he learned the timeless art of positioning as the primary No. 9. Stanford head coach Jeremy Gunn is a pragmatist, not an idealist, and he quickly realized what he had in Morris; a speed demon with Thor’s hammer for a right foot and a predilection to rope in his charging midfielders with layoffs.
This sparked an idea in Gunn. What if Stanford played off Morris as a developing back-to-goal striker in lieu of simply using him as a pseudo-striker winger?
Morris spent the better part of his final two years at Stanford working on his spacial awareness in the final third and relying less on simple athleticism. By the time he left for Seattle this past offseason, he was rapidly becoming a truer version of a No. 9 as Wondolowski might know it. Go back and look at both of his goals in the NCAA title game against Clemson. Both were born of positioning, not individuality in space.
To put it another way, they were Wondo goals.
Morris has now scored in three consecutive games, which is not an insignificant stat when taken in the context of his professional newness. In his first several games as a Sounder, Morris was arrayed on the right flank of the Sounders’ 4-3-3, but he too often found himself disconnected and out of touch with the build-up. In other words, he wasn’t in many dangerous spots.
Flash forward to Saturday’s 1-0 win over Columbus Crew SC, and Morris turned that right-sided deployment into a pseudo-center forward role. As we discussed after the match in this space, Morris’s touch map was decidedly central for a “wide” player, and he had a number of touches inside the Columbus box. Good players turn formational X’s and O’s on paper into jelly in favor of what they do well. It would seem Morris has already learned this.
Morris’ three goals have all come in different ways, but each exhibited the keen instincts of a player of Wondolowski’s ilk. His most recent goal is unarguably the biggest example, and one has to think that Wondolowski would’ve recognized it easily as one out of his own playbook.
In the 88th minute on Saturday, with the game scoreless, Joevin Jones drove in a low-flying cross that Oalex Anderson turned on goal. The shot was deflected back out into the box by Steve Clark, and Morris was waiting for it about two yards inside the six. With the goal gaping, Morris needed only take one step inside to whip a shot on target that pinged off Michael Parkhurst’s leg and into the net. The shot, workmanlike as it was, was worth three points of MLS table positioning.
There was nothing flashy about the goal, and it will hardly worm its way onto any league year-end highlight reel. It was fashioned simply out of timely positioning, being in the right place at the right time and reacting. In other words, emulating the career of a man named Wondolowski, who’s fourth on the MLS all-time goal scorers list.
Few of those probably stick in your memory, right? Except perhaps the ones scored against the Sounders, and he’s had a few. Nine goals in 16 games, to be exact.
Morris will always be a different player than Wondolowski in a few fundamental ways. But at least in terms of the way he approaches space tight to the goalmouth and uses it to his advantage, it would seem Morris and Wondolowski have more shared traits than one might except.
