Now, can this really be happening? Can it actually be that Sigi Schmid’s team might miss the playoffs entirely? Seattle sits fourth going into Saturday night … but Colorado could draw level on points later tonight, and San Jose could climb within a point before the weekend is finished.
Depending on how things set up, Major League Soccer’s final match of a very exciting 2013 season could be absolutely riveting. Because it very well may say whether the Seattle Sounders, including the league’s highest paid man, Clint Dempsey, will even be a post-season club.
What a stunning turn it would be – but the Sounders have left themselves here with poor results at crunch time.
The latest was Seattle’s 2-0 loss Saturday to already eliminated FC Dallas, seen on NBC on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Texas. And it was a pretty dour setback for the Sounders, all things considered … a loss without much of a real fight. Seattle and Dempsey only occasionally threatened an FC Dallas team missing its starting goalkeeper and best center back, George John.
That makes Seattle, where manager Sigi Schmid seems unlikely to survive if the playoffs aren’t reached (and quite possibly not even then, depending on how far the club gets in the post-season), winless in its last six MLS matches. The team has lost four in a row, out-scored over that time, 12-2.
Schmid, who was missing three significant figures in Osvaldo Alonso, Obafemi Martins and Eddie Johnson, is accepting a lot of the blame for a team that struggled to hold possession and failed to dig up an offensive rhythm.
“It rests on my shoudlers,” Schmid said, emerging from the visitors’ locker room about 20 minutes after final whistle. “We just aren’t able to come up with the right combinations on the field. … Those guys are fighting and battling. The combinations I’ve put out on the field just haven’t come up with the results.”
How is the mood of the locker room considering the run of poor results?
“Guys are obviously disappointed,” Schmid said. “But we have to get through the disappointment and come back and play. And I have to do a better job of getting the right combinations.”