Everyone has talked about Clint Dempsey’s hat trick against the Portland Timbers and his amazing production in three games. They’ve talked about Kenny Cooper slotting home two and Lamar Neagle providing quality effort up the wings. They’ve talked about a prolific Sounders offense early in the year. But what everyone doesn’t want to talk about is the goals the Sounders are leaking due to poor defense. The Sounders stumbled and fell in the later part of their 2013 season due to lack of production and poor defense, and on the backend of the field, the Sounders are starting to look pretty familiar to that dreaded team.
In the offseason the Sounders moved to change that. Addressing the issue of poor defense, they traded away Jhon-Kennedy Hurtado and Patrick Ianni and received Jalil Anibaba in return. They signed Chad Marshall, at one time thought to be one of the best defenders in the league. They released Michael Guspurning in goal and brought in Stefan Frei from Toronto. The backline was revamped and renewed and an emphasis was put on defense starting day one of the off season. Throughout the preseason Marshall and Anibaba teamed up and posted shutout and shutout, and things were looking good.
But so far this year, according to whoscored.com and soundersfc.com, the Sounders are giving up 15.8 shots per game, second highest in the league. They’ve conceded eight goals so far this year, tied for third most in the league. Stefan Frei has made 15 saves, and has faced 79 shots, the most in the league. The issue isn’t how many goals he’s let in, but why has he faced so many shots? I tell the kids I coach all the time, the keeper shouldn’t feel bad about letting in goals, that guy had to go through 10 other players to get to him. So we turn to the defenders, and question if they are playing up to the standard necessary to win an MLS Cup, the goal that both the ownership and management have said they have.
The pairing of Chad Marshall at center back with Djimi Traore isn’t the best option they have on the table. Traore and Marshall are both very similar players, tall and very effective in the air, but don’t have the out-and-out pace to keep up with quick strikers on a one-on-one. Balancing this type of defending out with a quicker player would be the better option, as both Zach Scott and Jalil Anibaba can get forward and be effective, as we saw with Anibaba’s assist and blocked shot on Saturday against Portland. Scott is one of the mainstays of this team, having played for the Sounders since their USL days and would have been my choice as a starter next to Marshall in the Cascadia Derby.
Secondly, there have been too many careless turnovers in the middle of the pitch, leading to breakaways that have either ended with a shot on goal or the ball in the back of the net. In the Portland game two of the four goals came from sloppy turnovers in the middle of the pitch. In the 8th minute Gonzalo Pineda gets the ball stripped away from his feet by Diego Chara and he easily blasts it into the goal. And again, in the 56th minute, a poor backpass from Kenny Cooper to Anibaba gets stripped right away by Maximiliano Urruti and leads to a breakaway and goal. In the Toronto game Marco Pappa tries to lay the ball back to Traore but Jermaine Defoe easily snatches it away and scores his second goal of the afternoon. That’s just the goals. There’s been a few near misses in each game, and two in the Sporting Kansas City game that Frei was lucky to get a hand on.
The old saying goes, “defense wins championships.” This is especially true for a team that only has a +1 goal count on the season. This weekend’s test against a very good FC Dallas team will really show if they have indeed focused on defense this week. Sigi Schmid has vowed that “We’ll be better defensively than we were against Portland.” If the Sounders can go into Frisco and stop the top scoring team in the league then all my worry will be for naught. But if they continue to play like they have in the first five games, they could be in for a world of hurt.
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