Seattle are in really good form as of late (7 straight wins, unbeaten in the last 10). Looking forward to playing up to a good opponent, not looking forward to playing against the Turf Monster.
For SKC , the good: Seattle has not been a prolific goal scoring team. They added forward Raul Ruidiaz, but he didn’t really show me much when they played Portland. The won their game vs Portland on an own goal and only took 6 shots, two being on target. Their passing accuracy in the final 3rd was only 72%. With a solid outing by the SKC back line, Seattle will have a hard time finding the net. Now, the bad: The sounders defense is very solid. They read the game well and recover quickly. Portland took 22 shots but half of those were blocked and only 2 of the others were on goal. I just don’t see Rubio penetrating their back line. If he does, it will take something special to beat Stephen Frei. PV will start Rubio, but I think Nemeth is a better fit for this game. They have home field advantage with a 35,000 plus crowd and are used to playing on plastic grass. It’s going to be a tough one, but I see a 1-1 draw.
I'm having a hard time envisioning points coming out of this game for Sporting. I never trust a game against Seattle. They have a way of annoying me severely.
Well, Dempsey won't be playing. OTOH, no idea if he's been anywhere near the 18 in recent weeks. but I figure retiring puts a cap on it.
It definitely was poor. Do not go onto the r/mls match thread. So much toxic Seattle commentary the whole way through.
I couldn't watch the game, had to work. I saw PV's comments that we were "unlucky." Any truth to it? What was the honest assessment?
According to the Audi numbers, this was a pretty comprehensive and glorious victory for SKC. While our overall score of 3069 is a bit low for an actually decent performance, their 1979 was on the edge of really bad. When we look at individual performances, we had 6 players at or above the average MLS starter performance line, though they did as well, their players were always trailing ours by a smidge. The highest rated player in this game was Zusi at 569 (which is a very good if not world beating number). I was a bit surprised by this. While I am well into the Zusi at RB is a god camp, I thought this was the first really shaky game I've seen from him. Go into his numbers and he did a little bit of everything right. 3 ints, 4 aerials won, 3 key passes (kind of huge). He blocked a shot. He won two tackles and he completed 67 passes though missing on 19, so not his best passing night. Yet, the eye test on his game said it was off. The OG was unlucky, but it was also not quite getting into a position to shut down the threat. His free kicks were meh (one worked, 3 didn't). Etc. Rubio repeated the sort of numbers he's been putting up. Take away the goal, and he wasn't overly involved. He clearly was not the problem last night, though. Salloi, Crlozet (bit unfair, I mean, LB?) and Melia ended up in negative numbers, Salloi at -79 was the worst. The biggest mark against him was a blocked shot from inside the box. But obviouslly, that' wasn't his problem. He wasn't even a little involved. He had 11 successful passes, and 3 unsuccessful ones. WTF? He didn't miss on a pass in the final third, but only tried 3. I'm convinced that he and Rubio try too much to inhabit the same spots, and he becomes less of a force because of that. Even so, this was an inconsequential effort. To be fair, I saw him on the right, left and center, dropping back, etc, but nothing worked for him. Nemeth's 18 minutes included 9 touches. Only one of them was negative, and for his time on the field 182 points is pretty good. Opara's night ended up almost dead on the MLS average, Take away the penalty caused and Opara had a pretty good outing (-255 for that, total score ended at 265). Clearly the numbers do lie. We were dominant on paper, quite not so during the game. One complaint: How many balls did we miss on simple traps (this is not an audi stat). I blame a crap turf for this, but crikey. Also, having watched on eurosport where they forgot to assign announcers and didn't even bother putting up the normal halftime commercials, I watched 15 minutes of Seattle watering the artificial turf over the halftime. The very first thing they did was water the side seattle would be attacking. The last thing they did was water the side we would be attacking (of course, they'd also be defending). No idea if that makes a difference, but we did seem to be slipping a lot, esp early on in the second half. I missed the first 10 minutes of the game, so Rubio's goal, sadly, because Eurosport forgot to push the button to broadcast the game until I complained. it was an annoying night.
There was some bad luck in that game. SKC was probably better in every way except putting the ball in the net. Too many missed chances in and around the box.
It’s fairly honest, an own goal off an unlucky deflection, pk call (rightly) for a ball hitting Opara’s arm as he was running. We also just had poor finishing, Gerso and Opara shoulda scored in the first half, Rubio shoulda scored a second in the second half.
If, by unlucky, he actually meant "I still haven't learned to make a single in game tactical adjustment", then yes it was accurate. Smith destroyed Zusi all day long. Balls played into the HUGE space vacated by Zusi when he pushes up (always) killed SKC. No adjustments were made. Sort of like watching Opara vs Barrios. Or Seth vs Oduro. Or Di Vaio vs our high line.
Zusi wasn't getting caught out in the normal way, through, was he? he was getting caught in no man's land. He also missed a coupe simple traps that kept pressure on us. HeHe made a decision to try a high risk slide tackle on the first goal instead of running back with and defending the man carrying the ball, which left Opara in a horrible situation. There's nothing definitive in this but it shows Zusi being far more active right around the midline than he is in his best games. It's not much of a difference, but I went back several games on his maps and there's almost a figure 8 to his touches. Up and down that right side. On the five yards on either side of the center line, he's less involved. this game map looks more clumped around the mid line. I don't know what that means, but maybe it implies he wasn't pushing up as far or as fast as he usually does, as he was playing more in the midzone? I'd add that an outside back hanging out in the zone around the midline isn't really pushed too far up. I think it was just a bad night on his part. It could be that their empty bucket (that was an empty bucket, wasn't it?) or more precisely Alonso forced him out of his usual game.
@zusi: I feel like it's a give and take. Tell Zusi to not be out of position as much and you take Zusi-the-RB-playmaker away from the sporting game which has been so beneficial to the goalscoring tally. What's more annoying to me, especially with the first Seattle goal, as mschofield mentioned, is his bad decision making. the sliding tackle to intercept the ball is a high risk low reward play that reminded me a lot of how medranda interprets the full back position. Even if he does intercept the ball, he only catches 2 seattle players out of position, but if he doesn't smith has acres of space in front of him. @toledo: terrible as always, though admittedly given the very questionable red card his decisions overall worked in our favor. would not be surprised if that's gonna be another higuainesque red card - rescinded by the committee although var was used to make the red card call. @vermes: I have to say I kinda agree with him. This game to me looked like one of those games where one team is clearly better than the other but not that much better that they will win regardless of any fluky events on the field. I'd be very surprised if Seattle had anything to do with the MLS cup this season, 8 wins in a row notwithstanding. What worries me the most is the continued complete lack of form of felipe. If we want to have a shot at mls cup, our most talented player has to show up, and it does not seem like it's gonna happen for him this season anymore.
Agree. He is not nearly up to the standard of play he displayed early in the season. He does OK for most of the game, but is no longer dangerous. In addition he has no pace and I don’t remember him being that slow before the injury. I just don’t see him fully recovering by playoff time.
Amen. But I tried to make stats sense of this, and it doesn't work. I went back and compared his game against Colorado, for which he had an Audi score of 928 and compared it to his game this weekend (172 or 178 or something). In March v an odd Colo side, he completed 41 passes. This weekend, 43. If you isolate him in the team map (click only him, and all stats) and look at the game maps, and jeebus, they are very similar. they don't give a total distance covered. I'd like to see that, maybe that's where the difference is showing up. I thought the difference would be in all areas of his game, but from what I can see it's really down to shots and goals, and if you tracked his career, the five goals in a month was a clear outlier for him. Watching him, there was a spring in his step before and he seems a bit labored these days.