This wasn't intended as an addendum to my tribute to the present Greatness of the New York rivalry, but it sort of played out as one. It also won't go on for long, because it's not a complicated thing to parse, no image needed, etc.
The Seattle Sounders are bad. I understand that I'm probably the 20th person to tell you the same thing this weekend, but, holy shit, they're like really, really bad. How bad? I have more on this later, when I talk about teams who are so bad that you almost have to throw out wins against them.
It gets weirder, actually, because when I saw the Sounders starting line-up going into what would become a 3-0 loss/suctioning of the spirit, it struck me as decent, maybe even decent enough to get a result. Having Dempsey under Morris seemed smart given their skill-sets, and putting Herculez Gomez opposite Andreas Ivanschitz made some kind of sense; Osvaldo Alonso didn't play (don't know why, don't care; not relevant), but Cristian Roldan and Erik Friberg felt competent, the defense, which has been good, was still there, and so on.
You can line up Argentina's starters and you'll never get a win if your team plays the way Seattle did on Sunday. Sporting Kansas City (oh yeah, that was the opponent, btw!) almost always outworks the opposition, but Seattle looked an awful, uncoordinated mess defensively: their players trailed their marks and the movement on the field generally, which translated to almost no pressure on the ball. Small wonder SKC could pick out players on their crosses. By the second half, everyone on the team was tuned out enough to reduce the game to skills drill for SKC – a shooting drill in particular.
It was either last week or the week before that Stumptown Footy's Chris Rifer tweeted the question of whether or not Seattle's coach Sigi Schmid would last through August. I replied that I thought he would, but, after that entirely dispirited shit-show, I'm not sure. When a team can't even muster the desire to defend its pride - and that translates to defending a beleaguered coach's job, that says something. Sigi could very well be done...
The Seattle Sounders are bad. I understand that I'm probably the 20th person to tell you the same thing this weekend, but, holy shit, they're like really, really bad. How bad? I have more on this later, when I talk about teams who are so bad that you almost have to throw out wins against them.
It gets weirder, actually, because when I saw the Sounders starting line-up going into what would become a 3-0 loss/suctioning of the spirit, it struck me as decent, maybe even decent enough to get a result. Having Dempsey under Morris seemed smart given their skill-sets, and putting Herculez Gomez opposite Andreas Ivanschitz made some kind of sense; Osvaldo Alonso didn't play (don't know why, don't care; not relevant), but Cristian Roldan and Erik Friberg felt competent, the defense, which has been good, was still there, and so on.
You can line up Argentina's starters and you'll never get a win if your team plays the way Seattle did on Sunday. Sporting Kansas City (oh yeah, that was the opponent, btw!) almost always outworks the opposition, but Seattle looked an awful, uncoordinated mess defensively: their players trailed their marks and the movement on the field generally, which translated to almost no pressure on the ball. Small wonder SKC could pick out players on their crosses. By the second half, everyone on the team was tuned out enough to reduce the game to skills drill for SKC – a shooting drill in particular.
It was either last week or the week before that Stumptown Footy's Chris Rifer tweeted the question of whether or not Seattle's coach Sigi Schmid would last through August. I replied that I thought he would, but, after that entirely dispirited shit-show, I'm not sure. When a team can't even muster the desire to defend its pride - and that translates to defending a beleaguered coach's job, that says something. Sigi could very well be done...
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