A 1-1 home draw against one of the league’s worst teams wasn’t the result the Seattle Sounders needed on Saturday night. Certainly not following the road loss against FC Dallas on Wednesday, and with four games left in the regular season. Failing to claim all three points at Lumen Field against CF Montreal allowed the gap between the Sounders and the play-in game – to say nothing of the playoff line, should things really fall apart – to shrink along with their chances of earning a top-four spot in the West.
The second half performance provided some reason to believe that this team is capable of better results. So, too, did the performances in the unlucky 1-0 loss to Dallas and the 3-0 win over New England Revolution. But that first half performance on Saturday was something completely different, and the Sounders were fortunate to go into halftime only trailing by a single goal.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever been more frustrated with a draw walking off the field,” said goalkeeper Andrew Thomas following the match. "It's a game we need to win. It's a game we should win. Even though we played as badly as we did in the first half, we put ourselves in a position to win that game in the second half.”
The good news, perhaps, is that this isn’t the first or the worst hole that the Sounders have dug for themselves this season, and on the grander scale they’ve been able to climb back out. That doesn’t make the hole they dug in the first half any less bad, though. The performance over the opening 45 minutes received boos from the crowd as the team headed to the locker room.
“It's deserved. We are here to entertain. We're here to make the fans proud, and we did not do that in the first half,” Thomas said, concerning the booing. "And you know, they absolutely should be holding us to a higher standard than that first half was ... we definitely didn't bring the intensity. Whether we were caught off guard by theirs or not, I think it's more in our control than out of our control.”
The reasons for that lack of intensity and the struggles of the first half were wide-ranging, according to Thomas. “It was technical breakdowns everywhere. We were sloppy with first touches. We didn't win like any second balls. I felt like we were going to get countered every single time we lost possession. Everyone could see it, everyone could feel it."
The improved performances and results over the last couple of months have not been without instances of those same sloppy touches, the failures to win second balls, misplayed passes, or the sense that at any moment one of those mistakes could create a counter attack opportunity that would undo any good work the team had done. The team’s quality and effort had largely been able to outweigh those negatives, but especially in the first half against Montreal they were instead compounded by some poor performances and heavy rotation coming in the third game in the span of a week and a trip to the East coast and back.
In the center of defense, head coach Brian Schmetzer started Ryan Sailor and Yeimar. It was only Yeimar’s second start since his return from injury, having also started in the win over New England; while Sailor was making his second appearance of the season, having only previously played in a start against FC Cincinnati on August 22. The pair clearly hadn’t played together, and clearly struggled for their lack of familiarity. While Yeimar was active, it was also obvious that coming into the match he’d only played 75 minutes since March. Attempted clearances and touches simply didn’t do what he expected them to, his reading of the game was a second slow and his responses lagged along with it. On the Montreal goal Yeimar gets caught, frozen between decisions near midfield and neither closing down Alexis Sanchez, tracking the run of Noah Streit in behind, nor really even adequately blocking the passing lane between them.
Before that particular moment the sequence began with the sort of imprecision in possession that plagued the Sounders throughout the first half and into the second, and has limited the team’s ability to properly control games on either side of the ball this season. Hassani Dotson, who struggled to build on his strong performance against the Revolution, played a pass to Albert Rusnak who tried to play it back before turning to run up field but put the ball between Dotson and Cristian Roldan. Dotson tried to recover but lost out on the 50/50 ball against Gennadiy Synchuk, and Montreal were away. After being beat, Yeimar made no real effort to recover, Nouhou tracked back but not with any real effort to get involved in the play, and while Alex Roldan made a recovery run, he did it from too far upfield having been advanced in possession. That all left Sailor practically alone defending a 2-on-1 where he nearly made the stop but got nutmegged instead.
Things could have gotten even worse in the first half, but ultimately the second half was strong enough that it’s not entirely unfair for the Sounders to be frustrated their improved performance didn’t result in more than a single goal. Club captain Cristian Roldan put it well following the game: “Of course, we'd like to have these three points, but it is a bit of a wake-up call. We haven't done anything yet, and if we want to do something in the playoffs, then we have to have complete performances.”
You’d hope that the loss to Dallas was as much of a wake-up call as the team needed, but here we are. The coming games won’t be easy, but between the showing in the second half and the potential benefit of knocking a bit more rust off of Yeimar and some other positives from this game like the performances of Jordan Morris and substitutes Jesus Ferreira and Sebastian Gomez, when the regular season ends and the playoffs begin the positives from this game may ultimately outweigh the negatives. For the moment those negatives still loom large, though, and they’ll continue to do so until the team gives us a reason to set them aside.
