Tactics and Trends: Familiar struggles

The Sounders played very uneven soccer over their last three matches. They won a game in which they were dominated, lost a game that they themselves dominated, and then lost another game that was statistically even in nearly every category but the score. The catawampus nature of the results makes trying to find a single tactical arch for all three matches something of a fool’s errand as none of the matches’ statistics tell the same story as their respective final scores.

Still, matches are won and lost by small margins, and often those margins are defined by how comfortable a team is playing within a certain system. Both by nature of injury and squad rotation as well as facing new opposing…