TUKWILA, Wash. – At this point, the return of Clint Dempsey appears to be a matter of “when,” not “if,” for the Seattle Sounders.
After missing the second half of last season and the entire postseason due to an irregular heartbeat, the 33-year-old forward has been medically cleared to return to action. He’s started four preseason games, his minute load increasing with each one, and Seattle head coach Brian Schmetzer told reporters on Tuesday he thinks there’s a “high probability” Dempsey will feature in Saturday’s season-opener against the Houston Dynamo (8:30 p.m. ET, MLS Live).
To hear Sounders general manager Garth Lagerwey tell it, the prospect of adding Dempsey back into what was already an MLS Cup-winning side – and an attack that also includes star midfielder Nicolas Lodeiro and Rookie of the Year winner Jordan Morris -- means the Sounders have ample reason to feel optimistic at the outset of their first-ever title defense.
“We feel like, in really simple terms, we’ve taken a championship winner and we’ve added Clint Dempsey to that team,” Lagerwey said on Tuesday. “So that’s really exciting. We’re very excited about how Lodeiro, Morris and Dempsey played together in the four games they got last year. And Dempsey and [center back Roman] Torres have yet to take the field together.
“We believe there’s a lot of reasons for optimism.”
The numbers from those four games that Dempsey, Lodeiro and Morris shared the field last season offer a glimpse at the possibilities. During that span, the Sounders went 3-0-1 with Dempsey scoring five goals, a brief but dominant stretch that Dempsey himself told reporters earlier this month he is hungry to try and replicate.
“While we were all three playing together I was having a great time,” Dempsey said. ”I’m looking forward to getting back on the field and trying to make an impact and playing, not only with them, but the rest of the team. It was incredible what they did last year winning MLS Cup.”
Of course, it isn't a foregone conclusion that Dempsey will recapture the form that made him into one of the top US internationals of all time. It has been six months away from competitive soccer, after all.
Schmetzer also cautioned on Tuesday that regaining the chemistry between the Dempsey-Morris-Lodeiro trio will take time, especially with Morris nursing a sprained ankle suffered at the tail end of Seattle’s preseason.
“The prospect [of having Lodeiro, Morris and Dempsey together] is great,” Schmetzer said. “But then we have reality when Jordy dings up his ankle and we can't have Jordy for the last [preseason] game. It's a work in progress. I don't want anybody to be too anxious if they don't quite get it like they had in those four games last year.
"They will get it, because they're all really tremendous soccer players, so I have high expectations. But I think it's still a work in progress.”
That tempered approach is probably a fair one, given the length of Dempsey’s layoff.
Even so, the notion that he could be a part Seattle’s starting XI for the 2017 season-opener is an encouraging one for the Sounders, just months after the bigger question was whether he would play again at all.
