Seattle Sounders performance; not that bad, I say

Rather, I’m surprised that so many Sounders fan believe their team played poorly.

Never take performance on the road for granted.

I know you guys are used to seeing a free-flowing, attacking team there. But consider a couple of points from someone at the match:

• Brad Evans and Osvaldo Alonso were freakin’ animals out there. Perhaps that was less than apparent on TV. Dallas plays essentially with three central midfielders. Alonso and Evans matched them with a fierce determination (with help, of course.)
• Sigi Schmid’s tactics worked to perfection. Dallas wants to play out of the back through Daniel Hernandez. Schmid had his forwards (Montero and Levesque) drop off the central defenders and deny distribution into Hernandez. By cluttering Dallas' usual midfield connections, he cut off the life line to its offense. From there, Dallas had Ugo Ihemelu and George John (neither the strongest of passers) dropping balls over the top. That’s all they had. Did it make for a pretty match? No. Was it effective? You be the judge – your team was ahead until, well, you know the rest …

By the way, Dallas is a flawed team in many ways. But it remains a dangerous team, one that naively attacks with little discretion. Dallas utterly overwhelmed Red Bull up in New Jersey last weekend … but lost largely because the only thing Jeff Cunningham was finishing was his chances at a World Cup spot. So, credit Seattle for arranging a game plan that severely limited good chances Thursday.

Finally, there’s this: I know everyone is apoplectic over Vaughn’s 93^rd minute decision. (I talked to Tyrone Marshall about it after the game. He had an interesting take, indicating that he looked immediately at Vaughn, who was stooping, moving and shuffling, straining to get a better look at things through a tangle of bodies. His point: it was clear: Vaughn didn’t have a good look at what was going on.)

It was a bad call. But in the bigger picture, to this point of quality of your team’s play Thursday, Vaughn did a lot to destroy that, too. I turned to a fellow writer 15 minutes into the match and said, “Here we have two teams who want to attack, but Vaughn is going to ruin this match.” If he calls a couple of those fouls early, maybe has a stern word with one or two players, then everybody understands how the game will be managed on the night. Then, with two teams willing and able to attack, we can all get on with it. And enjoy the heck out of it.

Instead, Vaughn “let’s them play,” as we hear from too many people who miss the point. So a kick here, a grab there, a little bit of the business over here … things escalate necessarily and then we have a match that devolves quickly into what we usually get in MLS. “It’s a physical league.” Yeah. We’ve heard.

So that made things difficult on both teams in terms of playing pretty soccer.

Oh, one more thing. League rules require that teams water the pitch before the match. Dallas requested and received permission not to because the winter grass (which will disappear soon) gets overly slick with moisture. So, the ball might have been a little sticky, too, which doesn’t help either team play attractively.

So, don’t be too hard on your team. On the road, on an imperfect field, against a team hell-bent for attack (whether it’s good for them or not), with Vaughn swallowing his whistle at every opportunity, minus Ljungberg, I just don’t see that it was such a bad performance for Seattle.

Success on the road is rarely going to be lovely in form.