Postgame Pontifications: Still a very flawed team

SEATTLE — There have been several false dawns for the Seattle Sounders this year. There was the six-game winning streak they put together only to run face-first into LAFC. That was followed by a run to the Leagues Cup quarterfinal where they were pancaked by LAFC … again. Shortly after that, they lost in the U.S. Open Cup semifinals … to LAFC … yet again.

Those three losses all illustrated a pretty clear ceiling for the Sounders; they were only going to rise as high as LAFC would let them.

Their 2-2 tie with the San Jose Earthquakes is in a different category, though. This was the kind of game the Sounders have been winning throughout the season — with a few notable exceptions. In fact, they had just basically dismantled Sporting KC under very similar circumstances a few days earlier. Coupled with their win over the Columbus Crew that preceded it, I was starting to feel comfortable with the idea that the Sounders were settling into something like reliable form.

Clearly, I was mistaken.

In dropping two exceptionally winnable points at home against the league’s worst team, the Sounders showed just how much of a flawed team they still are. For all the positive results and promising play over the last four months or so, the Sounders are still perfectly capable of playing down to opponents.

“These are the same mistakes we were making at the start of the year, but we can’t be making these mistakes later in the year,” Sounders midfielder Cristian Roldan said in the postgame locker room. “It will bite you in the butt even more, especially leading into playoffs. You have to be as sharp as possible. Dropping points against a team below the playoffs is frustrating.”

 This was the fourth time the Sounders have surrendered an equalizer in the 88th minute or later at home. It was also the third time they’d dropped points to a team at the bottom of the Western Conference standings.

What makes this result even more frustrating is that the Sounders had seemingly moved beyond this type of painful result, even within this game.

The Sounders started slow and went behind 1-0 on the sort of sloppy miscommunication that sometimes happens. To their credit, they came roaring back to take a 2-1 lead into halftime behind two Jordan Morris goals. The Sounders weren’t exactly rolling, but they did seem to be in control.

Even during most of the second half, the Sounders seemed to be the team more likely to score. They were constantly looking for counter-attacking opportunities and even generated several decent looks. Each time, though, they were just a little off. A slightly mishit pass here, a heavy touch there.

More than the missed chances, their undoing proved to be an inability to perform the more mundane task of seeing out a game. At no point, were they able to string together long spells of possession, force the Earthquakes to chase shadows and tire themselves out. If the Sounders ever completed as many as 10 consecutive passes in the second half, I didn’t notice it.

“Where is the group leadership at 2-1 to connect a bunch of passes, kill the game, make them chase the ball?” an obviously exacerbated Sounders head coach Brian Schmetzer said after the game. “They had 55% possession. That’s not good enough. I don’t care if it’s 2-1, you should be controlling tempo and creating chances that we need.”

That bit them on the decisive play, when the Earthquakes executed a pretty standard attacking pattern on which a host of Sounders veterans were just slow to react. Cristian Roldan was a step behind Jeremy Ebobisse on the cross; both centerbacks Jackson Ragen and Yeimar Gomez-Andrade were slow to fill the passing lane; and Alex Roldan never fully tracked Marie, who was able to get goal side on his run.

It’s the kind of goal you don’t expect one of the league’s best defenses to allow, especially at a point of the game where they should be most turned on.

“We train how to defend against players running into that zone,” Schmetzer said. “That’s a team goal that’s just poor in a lot of different areas. But it stemmed from not being able to get any sort of possession or establish tempo.”

Schmetzer took some degree of blame for the personnel decisions he made. While he mostly stood by his subs, he was more inclined to second-guess his starting lineup that was largely unchanged for the Sporting KC win just two days earlier. Starting Josh Atencio, who had looked good in his last start against the Crew and was energetic off the bench in this one, seemed to be one obvious change he could have made.

Still, he wasn’t ready to let his players off quite that easy.

“What I’d expect is if you’re not feeling it physically, you can still play smart,” Schmetzer said. “We can still connect passes in the first half. Establish your tempo. We should have closed the game out at 2-1, at a minimum.”

For this to be the fourth time something like this has happened at home this year obviously heightens the frustration. It’s tempting to conclude the Sounders simply aren’t good at closing out games. But they have closed out five similar situations on the road, suggesting it’s not quite that simple. What we know is the Sounders can’t simply coast.

We can also rest assured those are eight points that are bound to be costly. As it is, they’d be tied with the LA Galaxy atop the Western Conference if they’d held on in all of them. Just these two dropped points will almost certainly cost them a spot or two in the standings. If this season has told us anything, it’s that those margins matter and nothing can be taken for granted.