His head buried, Jordan Morris laid, facedown, five yards from goal, where the ball had been seconds earlier. That ball, of course, was now sitting out of bounds — not where he wanted it. For the second time that night, a Sounder wanted a play back. If there was a cosmic ‘redo’ button, this was the place for it.
But once again, the Sounders couldn’t find a goal to turn around what has become one of the worst starts to an MLS season in club history.
“I’ll give you the realities,” Sounders head coach Brian Schmetzer said postmatch. “We haven’t been blown out in any of our games, and the players haven’t quit. Those are two positives that are hallmarks of this club and this franchise.”
“So how do we change reality — which is that we are in last place,” he continued, “to start collecting points and start winning games? If I felt that the team was super negative or coming apart, I’d be way more worried.”
That doesn’t mean that it was good. Seattle conceded first — a goal that came as an amalgamation of a sopping-wet pitch, Nouhou standing nearly 10 yards out of position, and Stefan Frei’s inability to save a reasonably well-struck shot from Gabriel Pec.
“I’m sure Stef wants that one back,” Schmetzer said. “He was trying to punch it out, and it was obviously close range…they probably could’ve settled into the game in the first five minutes [more].”
Even missing leading scorer Dejan Joveljić, the Galaxy’s rotation up front frustrated the Sounders. Pec, the goalscorer, often stayed wide right whilst Joseph Paintsil floated in the middle, causing havoc in front of Yeimar and Jackson Ragen.
Part of those defensive efforts was Cristian Roldan, who shifted into a central midfield role instead of his normal right-midfield slot in the absence of Obed Vargas. “My role changes — it’s a little more defensive minded,” Roldan said. “I’m trying to break up tackles [and] play the ball into the half-space to some of our better players.”
Roldan won the singular tackle he contested and logged five ball recoveries, but only won half of his 10 duels, including four of nine ground duels. The first half wouldn’t offer much more in terms of clear-cut chances (those would come later on) as the two teams struggled through the rain. Seattle generated more shots — eight to the Galaxy’s six — but couldn’t muster an effort on target in the first 45.
“We haven’t had the best start to the year so — let’s be honest — everything will be out on the table,” Schmetzer said when faced with the proposition of changing his starting attackers.
“Jordan moved over to the left to start and we had Raúl (Ruidíaz) up front, so adding Danny Musovski means taking Raúl out,” he continued. “There has to be some thought behind that… there’s certain things that we as coaching staff are going to assess but we’re inching closer to changes needing to be made because we haven’t gotten the results that we want.”
The Sounders looked brighter in the second half, and generated eight shots, including two on-target chances, but were once again hamstrung by an inability to finish chances. A bevy of opportunities went flying past John McCarthy’s goal, the greatest of which fell to Jordan Morris in added time.
The Seattle native, though, couldn’t finish, and he saw his shot fall the wrong side of the post from just five yards away.
“Jordan has been a tremendous player in this league.” Schmetzer said, “I’m hopeful that it’s coming because he’s in [the locker room], he wishes that he had that chance back. Things will come for him, but we need him to speed things up.”
As Stefan Frei noted, “...there’s 87 points to be played for. At some point, it’s going to have to change.” Both he and Roldan were overwhelmingly positive in their postmatch availability; they noted that this was a defensive improvement from the three Seattle conceded last weekend at San Jose, something that Schmetzer corroborated, and that they created chances.
But at some point, it’s going to have to change.
“At some point, you will have to be rewarded for your efforts, and that’s where the floodgates open,” Frei said. “We have to try to stay on the path, find the positives, focus on the positives, because everything else is garbage, which doesn’t help us at all.”
They’ll look to start taking out the trash next weekend, with a much-needed home appearance in Seattle. Their opponents, one of just two other teams not to score on Saturday, are CF Montréal. It won’t be an easy game, though — none of them are for this team, who sit bottom of the Western Conference and in desperate need of a pick-me-up.
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