It hardly qualifies as an astute observation to point out that the vibes surrounding the Seattle Sounders have been off for the last few months. Yes, they’ve managed to grind out a fair number of results to keep the season from completely running away from them. But at no point since the 3-0 win over St. Louis City SC that left them 5-1-1 on April 8 had it looked as if the Sounders were playing like themselves.
While the Sounders had mostly kept matches close during that time, they had not managed to claim even a single point in the four matches in which they had conceded the first goal in that time.
The Sounders finally took a significant step toward reversing those vibes with Saturday’s 3-2 win over the Vancouver Whitecaps.
“It’s a super important result,” Sounders centerback Jackson Ragen said after picking up two assists. “It’s been a frustrating month. We’ve played well but didn’t get the results we wanted. Hopefully, this will be a turning point of the season. We were dominant today, probably one of our better performances of the year.”
If you’re one to look for vibe changers, I think this game has a lot of potential in large part because of how the Sounders managed to do it.
Not only did this win snap a six-game winless run against Cascadia Cup opponents, give the Sounders consecutive wins for the first time since that St. Louis game and come after falling behind twice, the winner came in stoppage time. That’s the first time the Sounders have scored any stoppage-time goal this year, it’s the first time they’ve managed to improve a result with a stoppage-time goal since the first leg of the Concacaf Champions League final and it’s the first time they’ve scored a stoppage-time winner since Raúl Ruidíaz did that in Leagues Cup against Santos Laguna in 2021.
Even if you loosen the criteria to include goals that came after the 75th minute, you’d have to go back to Aug. 21, 2021 to find the last time the Sounders changed a result with such a late goal. That’s the game where they scored in both the 88th and 89th minutes to score a 2-1 win at the Columbus Crew.
You’d have to go all the way back to the 2020 regular-season opener — yes, pre-pandemic — to find the last time the Sounders scored an actual stoppage-time winner in a regular-season game.
Goals like these used to be almost a staple for the Sounders. In 2019 alone, they had three game-winners that came after the 80th minute in September alone. That season, they had four winners that came in the 89th minute or later. From 2010 to 2019, the Sounders had at least one stoppage-time winner in every season.
I asked Sounders head coach Brian Schmetzer about the particular power of a stoppage-time winner. He didn’t seem to put much stock in his team’s recent inability to find late game-winners.
“Time is a figure of speech,” he said.
Maybe Schmetzer is right. The exact timing of the goal might not really make a difference. But it was a just reward for what I think was the Sounders’ most encouraging performance in months. Aside from the resilience they showed, the Sounders just looked like a team that could really play.
Aside from the mistakes they made on the two goals, they were mostly very good defensively, especially from open play where their only high-probability look came off a classic Route 1 goal kick.
Offensively, the Sounders were dynamic, especially on set-pieces which is how they scored all three of their goals. The first two were the product of both rehearsed movements and perfect deliveries, with Nicolás Lodeiro delivering the penultimate ball and Jackson Ragen heading it across goal for Léo Chu each time.
The winner was a bit more improvisational. It starts with Albert Rusnák playing a simple square pass to João Paulo, but then gets a bit more dangerous as the Sounders connect six quick passes. The attacking sequence started with a clever flipped ball from Rusnák to Chú, who then forces a save from Yohei Takaoka that fell perfectly to the feet of Yeimar who stroked it into the back of the net with his left foot.
From open play, the Sounders once again found a lot of joy on the left wing through Chú, who had a season-high nine progressive carries, received a team-high 14 progressive passes and was in the middle of just about every dangerous movement the Sounders made.
As we are finally nearing the end of this potentially season-defining stretch of six games where the Sounders had to play without most of their internationals — they’re 2-1-1 so far — it looks like they might finally be figuring out who they are and how they can actually play effective soccer when they’re not at full strength. It has rarely been this attractive, but they’re still second-place in the Western Conference and just three points out of first.
A win like this one, though, could be the kickstart they need.
“That group of players when they celebrated Yeimar’s goal that’s a team that’s committed and will do a lot of good things together,” Schmetzer said.