Sounders looking for their first MLS playoff win

Published 8:43 pm Friday, October 28, 2011

TUKWILA — If James Riley had any doubts about how special 2011 could be for the Seattle Sounders, they were erased on what turned out to be one of the most special nights of the season.

After winning their third straight U.S. Open Cup title at home on Oct. 4, Riley was struck by the different perspective in the locker room amid all the rejoicing.

“The turning point for me was after our Open Cup win, it was a different type of celebration,” Riley said. “The guys knew we really had different business to attend to. There were so many goals we had reached — how many points we had, how well we wanted to play on the road. After the celebration died down, the guys wanted to get right back to work.”

The Sounders did, wrapping up the best of their three Major League Soccer seasons with the second-best mark in the league at 18-7-9 (63 points). Now, they’ll get right back to work today trying to find some elusive playoff success when they open a two-game, aggregate-goals Western Conference semifinal at Real Salt Lake.

“We’re in a good spot right now,” Riley said. “There’s an urgency going in. We know we’re fully capable of doing well.”

As wildly successful as the Sounders have been in their first three seasons (a combined 44-24-26), they’ve been just as unsuccessful in their two previous playoff trips: 0-3-1 with one goal in 390 minutes of action.

Goalkeeper Kasey Keller, down to his last chance for a league championship before retiring, also senses this time will be different for Seattle.

“The first year (2009), there was a little bit of, ‘We’re an expansion team and we made it to the playoffs, and hey, who knows what can happen?’” Keller said about an aggregate 1-0 loss to Houston in 2009 that featured 210 scoreless minutes. “Last year, we put ourselves in such a deep hole (in the regular season) there was just an elation we made (the playoffs).

“But this year,” Keller continued, “there’s been more of a focus of, ‘We’re going to make the playoffs, and we’re going to get the job done once we do that.’ To me, it doesn’t feel like we’re in the playoffs. It feels like we’ve got two more games. It’s like this is what we’ve been gearing up for the whole time: two games here, we’ll take care of this team and move on to the next one.”

Seattle has soccer’s version of home-field advantage in the series — it will host the second game Wednesday and, if necessary, extra time at the end of that game to decide the series.

But coach Sigi Schmid said the Sounders won’t play passively just trying to get a tie tonight at Rio Tinto Stadium — a place where Seattle halted Real Salt Lake’s 29-game home unbeaten streak with a 2-1 rain-soaked victory on May 28. Real Salt Lake won 2-1 in Seattle in September.

“We’re a team that goes on the road to win,” said Schmid, whose team led the league with a 9-3-5 road record. “Sometimes, in all my years of coaching, when you put it in your team’s mindset, ‘OK, let’s just get out of here, let’s get a tie out of this one, let’s just get a result. … all of a sudden, you take the edge off your team. We’re not going to bypass chances to go forward and score goals just for the sake of getting a tie.”

After all, Schmid shares the same different feeling about the upcoming playoffs as his players do.

“This year, there’s a sense of commitment that we’ve got more to do,” Schmid said, “and we want to go further.”