Sounders coach Brian Schmetzer: I had to ask if game was boring

The Sounders completed the franchise’s most important and greatest win ever. And yet one question remains: Was Saturday’s MLS Cup championship victory boring?

It’s even something Sounders coach Brian Schmetzer told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson that he has been asking people.

“I’ve been asking around,” Schmetzer said Monday. “Soccer is a great sport but there are people out there that say it’s boring and stuff like that. And I’ve asked them, I said, ‘Look, just give it to me straight.’ It was 0-0. We weren’t that good offensively. Some people say it was a good game, some people might say, ‘Well, it wasn’t the most exciting.’ But there was a lot of drama there.”

Drama indeed. As 710Sports.com’s Spenser Davis wrote, no team before had ever gone the entire MLS Cup championship match without registering a shot on goal – let alone actually winning the game. There had also never been a final match where no goals were scored for the first 120 minutes. That changed on Saturday when the Sounders defeated Toronto FC in a shootout. Like Schmetzer, Davis acknowledged that it can be hard to accept that 0-0 games are exciting or interesting to watch, but he called Saturday’s match the soccer equivalent to a pitchers’ duel or a drawn-out defensive battle in football.

Schmetzer didn’t expect the game to go this way. He told Dori that his message before the game was to attack – not to be like Montreal, one of the Sounders’ previous opponents that bunkers in on defense and predicates its offense on countering.

“We wanted to establish pressure higher up the field, we wanted to possession in their half of the field,” Schmetzer said. “Toronto just was very good. You’ve got to give sometimes the opponent some credit in stopping our game plan.”

Which all makes sense, since nothing about the Sounders’ Cinderella season went according to plan.

When Schmetzer was picked to take over as interim head coach in November, the Sounders were sitting in ninth place in the Western Conference with a 6-12-2 record. The longtime assistant was taking over for Sigi Schmid, the only coach the team had ever known since joining the MLS. The response was an 8-2-4 record and improbable run through the playoffs that ended with the dramatic shootout.

The game nearly ended earlier if not for a leaping save by goalie Stefan Frei, who pushed the ball out of harm’s way just before crossing the threshold. Schmetzer said the save was way more impressive than it might appear to the untrained eye.

“As soon as the ball leaves (Toronto forward Jozy) Altidore’s head, he’s got to stop, pivot, regain momentum, push off and somehow get to a ball that was in the upper corner. It was a tremendous, tremendous save. It was really a good piece of goalkeeping. … You think goalkeepers play with their hands all the time, but actually their footwork is just as important.”

Instead, the game ended with a strike from a somewhat unexpected source: defender Roman Torres. Schmetzer said he wasn’t surprised, however.

“He keeps telling us that when he was growing up in Panama as a young man, that he was a center forward, that he was a guy that could score some goals. So when their guy missed it and Roman stepped up, I really wasn’t nervous in that moment. I was just really anxious for him to score so that we could celebrate and bring the cup back here to Seattle.”

Schmetzer, who said was at the Seattle Sonics’ NBA championship parade in 1979, said he is excited for his team and the city, and he is hopeful that “the whole city” comes out for the celebration scheduled for downtown Seattle on Tuesday.

“I wasn’t able to make the Seahawks’ parade (in 2014) but I’m hoping that a lot of people show up because this really is for the whole city,” Schmetzer said. “I think we have a rich sports history here and, again, I’m just pleased to be a kid from Nathan Hale doing his part to make the city proud.”

Follow @http://twitter.com/Mynorthwest