I am not going to try and pretend this fixture is anything more than it is: the soccer equivalent of two drunkards trading blows outside a dive bar at 3am.
Neither team is particularly good. And while I’ll get into the specifics of each team’s badness, there’s a certain charm to these types of matches. After all, both teams rock a green kit. Both represent cool, hipster cities whose coffee culture is among the nation’s best. Seattle may lack the star owner power of a Matthew McConaughey, but they have MLS’ only dedicated marching band. And that’s something.
Seattle Sounders Slippery Slide
In this MLS season of two halves, Seattle has been one of the weird teams. They started the season as a haramball outfit whose dismal offensive record was compensated by tenacious defensive rigor. They conceded the joint-fewest goals in the MLS first half (11) while scoring the third-fewest (17). Still, they had a +6 GD and were in 6th place in the West. They were the team that nobody wanted to play.
Enter the World Cup break. And a July 16th visit from the Timbers.
To be fair, Seattle façade had already started crumbling in May when they dropped their final two matches to the Los Angeles teams. But that Portland 5-1 shellacking at Lumen Field just felt like a defining moment of the Sounders’ season. And it has set the stage for all the subsequent misery.
Losses to Austin and Philadelphia (two of MLS’ worst). A 3-0 Leagues Cup defeat to Toluca down in Mexico that should have been a 10-0 loss (Stefan Frei saved their butt with 11 saves); then a 2-1 loss to Chivas. Their 3-0 win over hapless Querétaro is the lone blip in an otherwise flatlining trajectory of loss after loss after loss.
Going into tomorrow’s match against Austin, it begs the question: “How low can Seattle go?” They’ve already dropped to 11th place in the West, and those five consecutive league losses are looking like an arterial spray right now.
The Two Sides of Austin FC
It’s hard to say much of anything definitive about Austin FC; they’re the pablum of MLS right now. It fills your stomach, but doesn’t particularly taste good. Nor is it enjoyable to eat.
But then came the Leagues Cup, and we saw a whole new side of the Verde. Their campaign started with two shutout wins over Tijuana and Puebla. In their final match they battled on the always-stubborn Club América to a 1-1 draw, then prevailed in a penalty shootout. Austin looked lean, hungry, and very very dangerous. Improbably, their eight points was enough to make them one of the four MLS teams to advance into the quarterfinals.
I say “improbably” because in MLS league play, Austin is rather crap. They are currently 28th in the Supporters Shield standings; only Atlanta United and Sporting Kansas City are below them. True, they won their return-from-break fixture against Seattle Sounders. Then they lost the next three, including Saturday’s head-slapping defeat by Texans rivals FC Dallas.
They are defensively porous, having conceded the second-most goals in MLS (38). They allow the second most shots per game (17.2). Offensively, they are tepid. Myrto Uzuni and Christian Ramirez account for 11 of their 23 goals; the rest are spread amongst a coterie of eight other players.
How this Will Play
Austin FC is the only MLS team who have not won an away match. Seattle has a -1 goal differential while playing at home (most of that due to Portland).
Even a drunk can land a lucky punch, and my belief is Austin will land that wild haymaker.
Seattle Sounders 1 – 3 Austin FC
