TUKWILA, Wash. – Three games into their 2018 season, the Seattle Sounders are the only MLS club without a goal or a point.
Anyone who has followed the team over the past few seasons might feel like they’ve seen this movie before. Seattle got off to similarly slow starts the past two years, only to right the ship and make a run to MLS Cup both times.
But this year’s early-season struggles have been defined by a striking lack of discipline. The Sounders have drawn a red card in all three of their league matches so far, with star forward Clint Dempsey and starting defender Kelvin Leerdam each losing their cool and getting sent off in Seattle’s past two games for violent conduct.
The self-inflicted errors have resulted in the Sounders playing more than 100 of their first 270 league minutes with 10 men, crippling any chance at establishing cohesion or finding the form and swagger that helped deliver their back-to-back Western Conference championships.
“[The red cards come down] to me, because I have to make sure that I tell them exactly what the expectations are of this club,” head coach Brian Schmetzer said after Seattle’s 1-0 defeat to the Montreal Impact at CenturyLink Field on Saturday. “We don’t need to do those things. Because it’s not the way we want to do things.
“It puts the team in jeopardy, it’s not the style of soccer we want to do, it’s not the sportsmanship we want to have within this club. And, look, I get it. Guys get heated. It’s the heat of the moment. But that’s actually when you have to be most composed. And that sort of stuff is going to stop. It’s going to stop.”
Asked after Seattle’s training session on Tuesday at Starfire Sports Complex if he feels like it’s hard to gauge where the team is quality-wise, given the combination of injuries and ejections, midfielder Cristian Roldan demurred, saying he feels as though the Sounders aren’t playing well enough regardless of those external factors.
“In a way, yeah, but at the same time, we haven’t scored a goal,” Roldan said. “That’s the reality of things. Ten men or not, you’re not going to win a game if you don’t score a goal. And we could say the same thing for our back line, for our defense. We haven’t had a clean sheet … We have to play smart on both sides of the ball; even when we have 10 men, we can still keep a team to a clean sheet. Atlanta did it [vs. Minnesota], why can’t we?”
But the string of preventable disciplinary lapses certainly isn’t making things easier. Schmetzer said on Tuesday he’s addressed the issue with the team and he feels as though the message has been received.
“If [the players] haven’t figured it out based on our conversations, then I’m really doing something wrong,” he said. “So, they get it. Kelvin gets it, they all get it. We’re going to put that to bed.”
