By Toby Dunkelberg
It’s a scary thought but the Seattle Sounders of 2015 might be even better than their counterparts from a year ago.
Say what you will about an inability to convert possession into goals, but a goal differential of nine in only twelve games is unheard of for Seattle. Surprisingly that goal differential is mostly coming from stalwart defending, with Seattle leading the league with the fewest goals allowed.
That’s not to say their offense is bad, because it isn’t. With eighteen goals in twelve games only the Columbus Crew have a higher goal per game average. That effort has been led by Clint Dempsey and Obafemi Martins who have combined for thirteen of those goals and seven out of the sixteen assists. The Sounders attack for the most part has been Martins and Dempsey.
But despite having eighteen goals scored, the Sounders have only managed to score eight goals at home, including only three in their last four home games. In each of these games Seattle saw the majority of the ball but because the opposing teams played extra defensively they kept Seattle from generating many clean looks on goal.
One common criticism of the Dempsey/Martins duo is that the game plan to defend against them is fairly straightforward and effective. All an opposing team has to do to deal with the threat is push their center backs up and drops back a CDM to clog up the space where they normally combine.
In doing so it forces the pair to look elsewhere in order to score goals. Teams rarely opt for this strategy at home since it’s so defensive that it makes it tough to score a goal in general, much less against a team which has only given up nine goals all year. Also they have their own fans to entertain. But when they have to play the Sounders at CenturyLink Field a draw starts to seem pretty appealing. So more and more teams are starting to adopt the game plan. The bad news for Sounders fans? It’s working.
Dempsey and Martins are still scoring but they are only able to keep up their pace by having a ridiculous conversion percentage on their shots of 27% and 32% respectively. But despite that percentage they are scoring less at home with only two goals between them in the last four home games. For comparison, in the last four road games they scored six goals despite the fact that Martins missed two of those games.
A large part of that is because opponents have been effective at stopping Seattle from generating shots, especially from Martins and Dempsey. Despite being the focal point of the attack, Obafemi Martins only has just as many goals as Lamar Neagle and Marco Pappa with 19, and Dempsey only has seven more at 27 shots. So opponents defensive strategies are effective at limiting the shots that Martins and Dempsey are taking, and that’s a large part of why Seattle have been struggling to score at home.
Can Cristian Roldan get to grips with close marking at CenturyLink?
Now the question for Sigi Schmid is how to fix it.
The answer is pretty obvious and we have to look no further than the game against Colorado on Wednesday for a great example. A team consists of eleven players but outside of two road braces by Lamar Neagle against Colorado and Chad Barrett against Vancouver, the rest of the team has been silent. If a team’s attack is entirely one dimensional all you have to do is defend agains that one thing and you’re golden. Seattle at home was largely one-dimensional so they didn’t score many goals. That one dimension for the Sounders is very potent so it’s something they desperately want to get going. The way to unlock that though is to force opponents to divert defensive resources from stopping that one dimension. Put another way, the side needs to have other players threatening offensively.
Against Colorado Marco Pappa was on fire, he was able to combine with Dempsey and Martins in the middle but also pass it out wide for a fullback to cross in, or simply cross it in himself. In short the reason why Seattle had so many good chances against the Rapids was because they had multiple threats and we’re simply able to overwhelm a bunkering Colorado.
