Even after last Friday’s dramatic 1-0 victory over D.C. United, the Seattle Sounders are nonetheless mired in their toughest stretch of the 2015 season, struggling to score goals amid a 1-4-0 skid across all competitions since their controversial 3-1 US Open Cup elimination at the hands of the Portland Timbers on June 16.
However, you'd never know it from talking to general manager Garth Lagerwey.
Seattle’s first-year GM has been jovial as usual in his recent interactions with the media, making quips about the weather, shaking hands with reporters and generally seeming wholly optimistic about the future.
Lagerwey says Seattle's current struggles must be treated with patience and predicts it will be crucial for his team’s development down the road, especially as they search for scoring without their two goal-scoring superstars, Clint Dempsey (US national team duty) and Obafemi Martins (adductor strain).
“I know there’s a lot of anxiety right now around the short-term results around the team,” Lagerwey said. “But if you have eight figures of money off the field, 10 million dollars of spending off the field, out of 12 or 13 [million], it’s tough. You have to take your lumps sometimes.
“We’ve had some negative results when we haven’t had our team [together]. We’ve had a pretty perfect storm of missing all of our DPs at the same time and having some pretty key injuries on top of that. And it’s going to get worse, by the way, before it gets better, because now [midfielder Marco] Pappa is gone and [defender Brad] Evans is gone.”
For Lagerwey, it’s all about the bigger picture.
The shorthanded roster isn’t an excuse for underperforming, he says, but rather an opportunity to find ways to grow. If the Sounders boast the most feared attack in MLS with Dempsey and Martins in the lineup, how dangerous do they subsequently become if the pieces around them start to fire on all cylinders?
It’s a question the Sounders hope to find the answer to come August – and one that they believe will give them a better chance at the franchise’s first MLS Cup when playoff time comes around.
“If we can figure out how to score goals without Clint and Oba, that’s going to make us a better team,” Lagerwey said. “If we can learn to how to possess the ball better and defend better as a group when we don’t have the full firepower – because that’s what we have to do to win games – that’s going to make us stronger as a group.”
Seattle right back Tyrone Mears, who scored the game-winning goal in the 88th minute against D.C., also said it’s important to analyze his team’s recent rough stretch from a rational perspective.
- Catch more Rave Green news and notes at SoundersFC.com
“We didn’t suddenly become a bad team,” Mears said. “I think it’s literally just confidence. And the way we’ve played previously, with Clint and Oba, we have a way of playing. You take those two players out, any team in this league will struggle. Teams in Europe would probably struggle as well. It’s just about finding a different way of playing.”
For now, it’s all about keeping things afloat as the Sounders prepare for a marathon August in which the CONCACAF Champions League kicks into gear, on top of the already-rigorous grind of the MLS season.
“The whole exercise in July is going to be, how do we get ourselves to a point such that in August – when we get our players back – that we’ll be in the best chance to win the MLS Cup and advance out of Champions League?” Lagerwey said.
“Those are our goals. Not the games we win or lose in June or July.”
