Music City blues: Seattle Sounders fall to Nashville SC for the second time this season

In their first trip to the state of Tennessee, the Seattle Sounders had an opportunity for revenge after suffering an opening day loss to Nashville SC back in February of this year. Unfortunately for the visitors, the outcome was the same, as Nashville defeated the Sounders 1-0 for the second time this year and completed the season sweep of their western conference foes. By accomplishing this, Nashville SC became the first expansion club since LAFC in 2018 to successfully beat Seattle in both of their first two meetings with the Sounders.

Seattle started the match in a lively fashion for the first five minutes, mainly through promising moments featuring Cristian Roldan and Jimmy Medranda, but that changed very quickly. Nashville SC began turning the heat up on the Sounders, but the visitors were able to escape from near-goals for the home side, including a Hany Mukhtar free kick effort that was saved by Stefan Cleveland and Nouhou’s heroic last-ditch efforts to prevent CJ Sapong from scoring a tap-in goal. Nashville SC finally broke through and broke the deadlock in the dying minutes of the first half, when Nicolás Lodeiro had his pocket picked in Nashville’s defensive third before CJ Sapong was able to connect with Hany Mukhtar for an easy counter-attacking goal after the hosts surged through a surprisingly disjointed Seattle backline without much difficulty.

“We can’t lose the ball in that area of the field and our active defending has to be a little bit better,” said Brian Schmetzer. The Sounders’ head coach and several players have recently been re-emphasizing the importance of not conceding easy goals to oppositions, as the team has been doing over the past several weeks against CF Montréal, the Portland Timbers, and now Nashville SC. “When you give goals to a good opponent, then you’re swimming upstream, then you’ve got some challenges that you gotta face,” said Schmetzer. The first half as a whole was quite surprising and very uncharacteristic of a Sounders team that made history and won the CONCACAF Champions League just a couple of short months ago. Cristian Roldan certainly felt this way about his team’s performance after the match on Wednesday night. “As a team, I think that we struggled especially in the first half,” said Roldan. “We could have done a lot better of playing as a unit.”

The Sounders started showing more signs of life, particularly in the attacking third, beginning at the hour-mark of the match when Danny Levya and Will Bruin were introduced to the game and Schmetzer’s side reverted to their ideal 4-2-3-1 formation. Despite Seattle having several goal-scoring chances in the final 30 minutes of play, including Nouhou’s shot that was tipped away by Nashville goalkeeper Joe Willis before hitting the post and Bruin’s close-by shot veering away from the path of the goal at the last moment, the Sounders were unable to get the equalizer and they will be leaving the Music City with zero points to show for their second ever affair with Nashville SC.

After picking up points for the majority of the first couple of months after their CCL triumph in early May, the Sounders find themselves in another slump in regular season play, having lost three of their last matches and failing to score a goal in either of their two previous games. Both Cristian Roldan and Brian Schmetzer were incredibly candid about the team’s recent performances after the contest with Nashville on Wednesday night. “We’re definitely frustrated losing three games out of four, but I think we’re not doing ourselves any favors by shooting ourselves in the foot,” said Roldan. “We’re going down 1-0 or we’re conceding goals that we normally don’t concede, and I think that’s been tough for us because when you’re constantly chasing games, you leave yourself exposed in the back.”

Brain Schmetzer seemed to relate to the sentiments of his star midfielder. “I think if you asked a lot of those players if they think it was a good performance by their standard, I would think a lot of those players in there would probably give you an answer no,” said Schmetzer. “I just don’t think we executed very well today in our attacking movements until in the second half when Danny (Leyva) came on.” Despite the disappointing result, Schmetzer was pleased with the contributions made by Will Bruin and Danny Leyva once they were subbed on and mentioned that there might be increased opportunity for this duo of players going forward in the coming weeks. “Will (Bruin) always works hard, he’ll get more minutes now that Raúl is down so we’ll see if we can’t get him firing and scoring goals,” said Schmetzer. “Danny (Leyva) played super well in Toronto and he backed that up with another good performance here, so credit to the kid. I think he’s playing with a lot of confidence, so he’ll get rewarded for that.”

Will Bruin and Danny Leyva might be two members of Schmetzer’s squad who may even get a nod for the starting line-up for Seattle’s next match in a matter of days against the Chicago Fire in the Windy City. The Sounders’ head coach has shown time and time again this season that he is not afraid of rotating his squad during multi-match weeks and relying on the depth of his group of players. After failing to pick up any points in the first two matches of the ongoing three-match week, the Sounders can end this busy stretch of days on a positive note if they can replicate the success they had in Toronto against another eastern conference club on the road this weekend. Cristian Roldan said it best in Wednesday night’s post-match press conference. “Time will tell and things will go our way eventually, but for now we just got to stay positive and keep reinforcing the principles that we fall back on.”