7 storylines for tonight's Seattle Sounders-Portland Timbers rivalry match
One of the best rivalries in MLS is back. The Portland Timbers go to Seattle to face the Sounders on Sunday (9:30 p.m. ET on FS1) and for both teams, it’s a big game. Well, it’s always big when these two bitter rivals face off, but for maybe the first time ever, the teams will square off just as both are really in need of statement wins.
Here is a look at seven things to know going into Sunday’s rivalry clash:
1. These teams (and cities) really don’t like each other.
For anyone who follows even just a bit of MLS, this one is pretty obvious. Heck, anyone who’s spent time in the Pacific Northwest knows there’s a little bit of a rivalry between the two cities. Whose soccer is better? Whose coffee is better? Whose weather is cloudier? It’s all up for debate.
But what we do know is that fans will go all-out for this rivalry, just as they always do. (If you need catching up, see our top moments in Sounders-Timbers rivalry history from earlier this season.) These rivalry games will be the biggest games for each team all year, up until the playoffs.
The Timbers Army wowed everyone with a haunting tifo when these two teams met earlier in this season, and the tifo itself was a comeback to a previous tifo done by Seattle’s Emerald City Supporters:
Your move, Seattle.
2. Both teams really need a momentum boost.
Portland coach Caleb Porter knows that more than bragging rights are on the line, given where each team sits in the standings. This rivalry match is a big opportunity for both teams to get in the groove, gain some momentum and turn their seasons around -- and both teams really need it.
“What I've noticed in the three and a half years I've coached in this league against Seattle is that it's always bigger than three points in terms of momentum and confidence,” Porter said of what a win against Seattle means.
For the Timbers, they are reaching the point where if there don’t start clicking and stringing together more consistent results, they could drop out of playoff contention. The problem is, the soccer gods haven’t helped this year and have thrown a bunch of bad luck at the reigning MLS Cup winners, including lots of injuries.
For Seattle, it’s been an even harder road. Normally one of the winningest teams in MLS, the Sounders sit one spot up from the bottom of the Western Conference table. They’ve never missed the MLS playoffs in franchise history, but with less than a third of the season left, they sit well below the red line. There have been a lot of reasons for it, but the bottom line is this has been their worst MLS season ever.
3. Seattle recently fired their coach, Sigi Schmid.
Being on track for the worst MLS season in Sounders history did not sit right with the club. With the Sounders sitting one spot away from the bottom of the Western Conference, they fired longtime coach Sigi Schmid less than a month ago. He was an excellent coach, but something had to give.
Longtime assistant coach Brian Schmetzer took over as the team searches for a permanent replacement, but Porter said he doesn’t expect that to change anything in this rivalry, although it will be strange to not see Schmid there.
“Every time we’ve played Seattle, I initially thought about Sigi Schmid,” Porter said. “But I remind people, Schmetzer was on the bench for every single one of those games as well. Schmetzer has been Sigi's right hand man for the last eight years.”
4. Seattle recently signed a new star player, Nicolas Lodeiro.
While Schmetzer deserves his due credit for setting Seattle’s game plans in their recent wins, it’s pretty clear that the biggest influence has been a different new arrival: Uruguayan midfielder Nicolas Lodeiro.
As it turns out, the guy is good at soccer. Like, really good. And since he has been on the field for Seattle to set the tempo and add creativity to the attack, the Sounders have looked like a different team. Lodeiro just sort of makes everyone else play better.
“Lodeiro has made Seattle a much different team in the attack,” Porter said.
The Sounders have only played three matches with their new midfield maestro, but they won two of those and tied one. For some perspective, in the 20 games they played before Lodeiro’s arrival, they only won six. So they won 30 percent of games before Lodeiro and 66 percent after Lodeiro -- look, it’s a small sample size, but the former Boca Juniors midfield instantly doubled the Sounders’ win rate.
5. The Timbers have never won in Seattle during the regular season.
CenturyLink Field is perhaps one of the most intimidating places to play in all of MLS. The Sounders fanbase is passionate and turns out in huge numbers. The Sounders regularly sit at the top of the attendance standings and when the Timbers went to Seattle last year, it was the Sounders’ fourth-highest attendance ever at 64,358 fans.
But the Timbers have one of the loudest fanbases in MLS too, so that can’t really explain why the Timbers have never won in a regular season match in Seattle. (They did win one playoff game in Seattle in 2013, which certainly added fuel to their rivalry.) Schmetzer chalked up the Timbers road woes to the difficulty of winning games in MLS, no matter where they are.
“Our league is a very tough league. It's a streaky league,” Schmetzer said. “There's a lot of parity. Whatever the reason is for Portland's struggles up here, you could say that in the game that counted the most in the playoffs, maybe that was the victory that mattered most.”
6. The Timbers have new reinforcements on the back line.
Injury has decimated the Timbers this year, especially on the back line. Porter insists it is not an excuse, but at the same time, it clearly has affected the team’s chemistry a bit.
“We’ve only played the same lineup twice,” Porter said. “That’s been because of injuries and suspensions and international duty. We haven’t been able to settle into a rhythm of continuity.”
The good news is the team signed three new defenders in the summer transfer window to mitigate the constant stream of injuries, including one that ended the season of centerback Nat Borchers. The team brought in Steven Taylor, Vytas Andriuskevicius and Gbenga Arokoyo.
The most noteworthy one there is Taylor, a longtime Newcastle centerback, but Porter was coy about whether Taylor will make his debut against Seattle, calling it “promising” that Taylor played 90 minutes with the Timbers reserve team last week.
“We'll make what we feel is the right decision,” Porter said. “At this stage, we need to go with our best group and, yet, we have to be mindful of playing players before they're fit.”
7. The teams are playing in back-to-back weeks, and the Sounders could bypass the Timbers in the standings.
MLS scheduling isn’t always perfect and this year, one of the oddities is that the Sounders and Timbers face each other in back-to-back weeks, this weekend and next weekend. While it’s debatable whether that’s good or not, it has the net effect of letting the rivalry control a pretty pivotal moment in the playoff push.
Seattle sits in ninth place, five points away from the Timbers, in sixth place -- the spot that just so happens to be the last playoff spot. If Seattle can win twice, they will leapfrog Timbers and squeeze them out of playoff position.
Teams normally only play a home-and-away series during the playoffs, so the back-to-back scheduling adds an extra dimension to this already tense rivalry.
As Schmetzer put it: “It feels like playoffs in the middle of your season.”
But for the Sounders, they really just needs points.
“I am well aware of the mathematics, the arithmetic and everything, but because we're in this predicament, because we dug ourselves in a little bit of a hole, I hate to be cliche but we have to focus, whether it's Portland or not,” Schmetzer said.
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