TUKWILA, Wash. — The Seattle Sounders enter Thursday night’s Knockout Round playoff match against Sporting Kansas City (7 p.m. PT; FS1, UniMas, KIRO Radio 97.3 FM, El Rey 1360AM) in a familiar position. In a way, the Sounders have been preparing for the game since late July.
Interim head coach Brian Schmetzer took the reins for the final 14 games of the season, a stretch in which the team went 8-2-4 and surged from playoff pretender to playoff host. Fighting for their playoff life, the Sounders are no stranger to the necessity to string together results.
“The team as a whole is prepared for a big occasion,” Schmetzer said. “We’ve been one game at a time in must-win games for 14 games now…That mentality is engrained in the group and it’s not going to change.”
Said midfielder Nicolas Lodeiro through a translator: “Our goal was to get to the playoffs. Now we’re here. What we have to do is approach every game like it’s our last game, and that’s what we’re going to do starting tomorrow.”
Seattle hosts a Sporting Kansas City team that it has not defeated since 2014 and is one of the most physical teams in the league. SKC has quality up front in leading goalscorer Dom Dwyer (16 goals) and midfield playmaker Benny Feilhaber (seven goals, 13 assists), but has only won twice since Aug. 20.
Schmetzer does not expect Sporting to sit back and let the game come to them, despite playing on the road. He’s ready for them to come out firing, and he wants to find and exploit the spaces that SKC will leave open as a result.
The biggest key for Thursday, though, will be whether or not the Sounders can carry the momentum with which they ended the regular season into the playoffs.
“If you go backward, [before Thursday] it was a loss in Dallas and a draw at home,” Schmetzer said. “We are trying to fine tune things. We are making sure that we go over everything, over every little detail to make sure that we give ourselves the best chance of winning.”
Depending on the result of the LA Galaxy and Real Salt Lake Knockout Round match on Wednesday night (7:30 p.m. PT; UniMas, MLS LIVE), Seattle would either face FC Dallas or the Colorado Rapids in the Western Conference semifinals.
The Sounders are not looking past Thursday by any means, but their confidence and belief are as strong as they’ve been all year. Forward Herculez Gomez said on Tuesday that teams don’t want to play them right now. With the run of form Seattle is currently in and the way it’s clicking in all facets, it’s easy to see why.
“I wanted to come here and be a big part of the success we were having,” said Lodeiro. “It’s one of those games where we live and we die, so it’s exciting to be a part of it.
“The game is 90 minutes long, we need to not get ahead of ourselves and let the game flow naturally.”
