EVERETT — Even North Sound SeaWolves coach Alex Silva had to admit that now is probably a perfect time to call it a season.
After watching his team spend June in contention for a playoff spot, Silva looked on helplessly as the SeaWolves completed an extraordinary collapse Friday, losing to the Portland Timbers U-23 team 5-1 in front of a crowd of about 150 fans at Goddard Stadium.
North Sound finished the season 4-8-4, losing its final five matches — including a friendly against England’s Port Vale — by a combined score of 25-6.
“It’s a good time to finish the season,” Silva said with a smile. “We had a good June and then we lose two top players (goalie Claudio Lazar and forward Abdu Aman) for two games and everything seemed to break down. We lost all the momentum we built.”
The SeaWolves finished June 4-3-4, with an impressive tie against league-leading Kitsap, and were right in the middle of the Premier Development League Northwest Division playoff hunt. And then all of a sudden, everything fell apart, culminating with Friday’s one-sided loss to Portland (6-6-4).
“We started the season slow while everyone was getting a feel for each other,” SeaWolves 39-year-old veteran Craig Tomlinson said. “But then we started to play with a lot of confidence, our confidence grew and we moved up in the standings and became competitive. Unfortunately we had some injuries and some bad decisions and it hurt us and it just continued. But it happens, those things happen at every level, and then all of a sudden the season is over.”
The game turned shockingly fast, as the teams battled back-and-forth for the first 23 minutes with few shots actually getting off. North Sound attacked regularly, the beleaguered defense held strong and it looked like perhaps the losing streak might, just might, come to an end.
And then Portland scored three goals in a five-minute stretch and the misery continued. First, defending PDL MVP Brent Richards, a University of Washington standout, corralled a free ball off a corner kick and finished for his eighth goal of the season in the 24th minute. Two minutes later, Lazar made one of his few mistakes this season, running far out of his box to get a ball only to have it take a tricky bounce away from him to Portland’s Erik Hurtado, who easily scored. Three minutes after that, Hurtado scored again after getting control of a deflection on a play some argued should have been called an offsides.
Hurtado made it a hat trick just before halftime, scoring a penalty kick after a questionable call in the goal box.
“It’s been the same thing with the defense killing us by giving goals away,” Silva said. “Even our goalkeeper, who is a great keeper, made a mistake, and the referee helped them out. At halftime I just asked them to win the second half. I didn’t want to get embarrassed and give up eight or 10 goals.”
North Sound didn’t win the second half, but it didn’t lose it, either. The effort was certainly there, but the execution wasn’t, as the defense struggled to mark and the offense continually gave the ball away either by holding it too long or simply being careless.
In the 54th minute, Portland’s Nick Palodichuk made it 5-0, going right up the middle past four defenders and easily beating Lazar.
The SeaWolves did get some shots off late in the game and finally prevented the shutout when Tomlinson, who had just narrowly missed a header on goal, lobbed a shot over Portland keeper Jason Dodson for a goal. But that was all North Sound managed and the season mercifully came to an end.
“We’ll look at it as the glass half full,” said Tomlinson, who said he’d like to play next year but stopped short of saying he’d be back with the SeaWolves. “I’m proud of the season, I felt it was a great start for a new team. We’re not happy but we had a shot to go into the playoffs for awhile and we have a core group of players to build around.”
“This year things happened very fast,” Silva said. “Now we’ll have a chance to really take some time to prepare and we’ll start doing that right away for next season. It was a good start for this team and now we’ll look to build for a better season next year.”
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