To put it mildly, Seattle’s match on Sunday against the LA Galaxy (1 p.m. PT; ESPN; KIRO Radio 97.3 FM, El Rey 1360am) will carry a significantly different feel than any before it.
Over the course of his decorated tenure in Seattle, Sigi Schmid missed the odd game here and there, mostly to either serve a rare suspension or for health reasons. But the Sounders - and the tens of thousands of fans in the stadium - always knew he was coming back. But he is not coming back this time.
Schmid, who mutually agreed to part ways with the Sounders earlier this week and thus ending a fruitful partnership that stretched back to Seattle’s first day in MLS, was replaced on an interim basis by longtime assistant Brian Schmetzer. The well-liked former USL Sounders head coach has plenty of experience running Sounders practices at times, so the team won’t miss much of a beat tactically.
But the emotional toll will no doubt be hard to fathom once the Sounders finally take the field Sunday without Schmid to guide them. The mood at training has been noticeably buoyant with the influx of new signees Nico Lodeiro and former Sounder Alvaro Fernandez, but the lack of Schmid is always floating off in the distance.
“I would say (the mood is) determined and working hard, as well as smiles on their faces,” Schmetzer said. “I think when you bring players of Flaco and Nico’s caliber, it automatically raises the level.”
Brad Evans, who was with Schmid for a decade with the U.S. U20s, the Columbus Crew and the Sounders noted that the mood in the aftermath was “surreal.” But ultimately, the captain knows as well as anybody that the window to dwell on it already passed them over. There is a game on the horizon, and it’s against arguably the hottest team in the league right now.
The LA Galaxy are coming, ready or not.
“It’s a challenge,” Schmetzer said. “The whole thing is a challenge.”
The Sounders may be the ones languishing in ninth place in the Western Conference well off the playoff pace. And the Galaxy may be the side inching closer to the top of the conference with the league’s best goal differential by six goals. But believe it or not, Galaxy coach Bruce Arena almost assuredly has the more difficult task on Sunday.
Even if Arena has his team selection and roster balance down to a science, he’ll have absolutely no clue what to expect from Schmetzer’s Sounders on Sunday.
Even as Schmid tinkered with his formation this year, Arena knew the man as well as anyone. The two have been sparring in MLS for nearly two decades, after all. But Schmetzer is a wild card, a relative unknown as an MLS head coach, and while it’s unlikely he’ll deviate too much from the formula simply for lack of training time, he’s his own man. Things will look different. There will perhaps be a return to a rigid 4-4-2, or different central deployments for the midfielders, or perhaps an entirely new role for Clint Dempsey.
Indeed, Arena might as well burn all of his Sounders game tape.
There’s also the matter of Lodeiro and Fernandez. The status of both is up in the air, but both joined training this week in good enough health and form to merit playing time on Sunday. In that sense, the Galaxy could be the first MLS team to see Fernandez play in three years and the first to ever face off against the silky playmaking talents of Lodeiro. It is perhaps a bit premature to pencil down either for starting minutes on Sunday, but it’s entirely possible one sees the field late on, if not both.
Bottom line is that Schmetzer has plenty of tools to play with. What if, looking at his cupboard of talent, he ultimately settled on a 4-4-2 diamond with Lodeiro pushing underneath Dempsey and Morris? It’s hard to imagine many better spines in all of MLS than Frei-Alonso-Lodeiro-Morris-Dempsey up the middle.
There are options beyond this, of course, but the point is that Schmetzer has scads of them with the addition of his two South American July transfers thanks in part to the tireless work of General Manager & President of Soccer Garth Lagerwey. That in and of itself helped contribute to the uplifted mood at training this week. The players no doubt miss any number of things about the Schmid era, but you can almost feel a fresh gust of wind brought in by these two potentially massive acquisitions.
A new epoch in Sounders history begins on Sunday against the vaunted LA Galaxy, who feature an in-form Giovani Dos Santos fresh off an MLS All-Star Game appearance and Nigel de Jong, the bone-crunching defensive midfielder who missed the first meeting between these teams on a suspension. With Steven Gerrard playing as well as he ever has in MLS, the ageless Robbie Keane in top form and the back line led by fellow All-Star Jelle Van Damme, tests don’t get much tougher.
As for what the Sounders look like on Sunday? The real answer to that question won’t arrive until game day.
