Brad Evans’ experience as an everyday center back did not begin auspiciously.
As you might expect from someone moved into the position after a club career spent almost entirely in the defensive midfield, Evans struggled to find his footing on the back line at first. At the start of the 2015 season, the San Jose Earthquakes put three goals past Seattle at home in a 3-2 Sounders loss, and Evans went back to the grindstone to familiarize himself with a patently unfamiliar position. That match was a sign he still had plenty to learn.
After nearly two full seasons at the position, Evans has finally established some consistency and a stirring rapport with regular center back partner Chad Marshall. Since the start of 2015, Evans has played 4,180 minutes, nearly all of them as a defensive anchor in front of goalkeeper Stefan Frei.
And it appears he’s about to move again.
Evans is an unquestioned leader in the Sounders locker room. It’s easy enough to point to the captain’s armband as proof, but his no-nonsense approach on the field tends to bleed into everyone else and lift the team’s collective motivation. As an MLS original Sounder, Evans also knows the expectations, the fan base and the nuances of life in the Pacific Northwest that most don’t.
Evans is also playing as well as he ever has. Even if he was shoehorned into a slightly awkward position, Evans is as spry and dialed in as he’s ever been. In short, you probably wouldn’t want to bench him.
The likelihood of Evans’ movement off the center back position was precipitated by the return of Román Torres, who launched off the bench for the first time in nearly a year two weeks ago. Nobody knew how Torres would recover from a knee injury he suffered last September, but his return to the starting lineup in San Jose last weekend proved he’s ready. Torres is an automatic starter at center back, and Marshall is still in top form. He’s not that far removed from his third MLS Defender of the Year honor.
That leaves interim coach Brian Schmetzer with work to do on the whiteboard this week in preparation for Seattle’s suddenly must-win home matchup against the Vancouver Whitecaps on Saturday. If you don’t bench Evans but you can’t bench Torres either, where does that leave you?
If Seattle’s laggardly 1-1 draw in San Jose on Saturday was an indication, Cristian Roldan probably won’t start again at right mid. He didn’t look natural there, and his rapport with Osvaldo Alonso in the middle of Schmetzer’s 4-2-3-1 is too good to keep them apart. And since Erik Friberg isn’t at all comfortable out wide, he can’t slot in at right mid either.
That leaves Schmetzer with a conundrum he was saved from making last weekend due to a back injury Evans picked up late in the week. Evans is healthy now, and so there are decisions to be made.
Evans is unquestionably best served next to Alonso, but he can be effective in more places than anyone on the roster. Evans has played right mid before, but he’s also played a fair amount of right back with the U.S. Men’s National Team. Regular right back Tyrone Mears happens to be mired in a slump over the last couple weeks after another quick start to the year. So until Clint Dempsey returns to the starting lineup from his hiatus for an irregular heartbeat, it’s not a stretch to wonder if Evans slots into one of those two spots this weekend.
Which could look like this.
Or this.
These aren’t drastically different, but they’ll play differently. Evans won’t step into the attack as a right back as much as Mears, and he won’t provide as much interchange higher up as Alvaro Fernandez, who himself has yet to find a comfort zone in his second stint with the Sounders. As a central player, Evans will want to come back and inside like Roldan did and find the flow of traffic. A winger he is not. In this construct it’s mostly a question of whether Schmetzer would prefer to have Fernandez or Mears on the field. And that could be a 50/50 decision depending on the Whitecaps matchup.
There are other ways Evans can be integrated into the XI, but these are probably the two safest bets. It’s unlikely Schmetzer benches Roldan to fit in Evans considering his tear this year, and it’s probably safe to assume Evans’ days as a center back are numbered with Zach Scott and Tony Alfaro available as backups to a pairing that isn’t budging save for injury.
The good news is that Evans is probably the most malleable player on the roster in a positional sense. He’s a chameleon, capable of playing a number of positions at a high rate and integrating into the flow of the build and the tenor of the defense.
And the good news for Schmetzer in particular is that he has a place to put Evans, even if it’s no longer at center back.
