Three things to watch in Sounders vs New England Revolution
May 26, 2016, 5:41 PM
(AP)
The Seattle Sounders are heading to Boston on Saturday to kick off their two-match road trip on the east coast. Their match with the New England Revolution is Seattle’s first road match with an Eastern Conference team this season. Seattle is coming off of a two-game losing streak against the two best teams in the league (Colorado and Dallas), and will be hoping to work its way up the table, starting with a win against a struggling Revolution team.
As I mentioned in my scouting report, New England in currently in eighth place in the East with 13 points and a 2-4-7 record. Both of their wins this season have come at home, but that’s from a total of seven matches played there. The match kicks off on Saturday at 4:30 p.m. on KIRO Radio 97.3 FM.
Here are three things to look out for in the match:
1. Jordan Morris is the main man. Perhaps it was inevitable after the Sounders lost Obafemi Martins in the summer, but the time has come for Jordan Morris to step up and carry the Sounders on his back while Clint Dempsey is gone. The young striker already has more goals than Dempsey on the season, but the pressure on him wasn’t truly hitting a fever pitch when he was playing alongside the very highly-paid and sought-after veteran. But like in the first match against the Rapids this season, the scoring spotlight is completely on Morris. Luckily for him, he’s already broken his duck for the Sounders when he went on a streak of four goals in four matches earlier in the season. Even though that pressure is off him, though, Morris is going to have the weight of expectation on him all over again. Against a fairly stout but not invincible Revolution defense, expect Morris to net himself a goal in what could be a fairly tight contest.
2. Sounders could be without their Air Marshall. As I said in the scouting report, the Revolution are very good in the air on set pieces — an area that the Sounders defense has been a little vulnerable to at times this season. Chad Marshall is one of the best defenders in the league in the air, and definitely the best on the Seattle squad, but he could be out. Brad Evans has made leaps in this area, and it’s one of the qualities that has kept Marshall’s likely replacement Zach Scott with the team for so many years. I think that Scott and Evans can compete with the Revolution’s main strikers in the air, but it’s on set pieces that the Sounders will be most vulnerable — New England floods the box with very tall players, more than just Seattle’s center backs can handle alone. The rest of the team will have to step up and stay focused in those moments in order to keep the ball out of Stefan Frei’s net.
3. The reappearance of Darwin Jones. The Sounders were very keen on signing the former University of Washington striker to a Homegrown Player contract at the beginning of the 2015 season, but the majority of playing time he’s seen has been with S2. In preseason and with S2, Jones has looked every bit the player that the Sounders had hoped he’d be. But in his limited time in competitive matches for the first team, Jones has failed to impress. In the absence of Dempsey, Nelson Valdez, and Oalex Anderson, Jones will probably come off the bench against the Revolution. If he takes his playing time, however little it ends up being, and impresses the coaches, he could find himself starting up top with Morris in the weeks to come. Jones is quick, technical, and has a nose for goal — he just finally needs to put all of that to use in a Seattle Sounders jersey.
Spenser Davis also covers the Sounders for Sounder at Heart.