Martins’ form has been a large part of Sounders early season success

If the Sounders want to score more goals against bunkering sides this season, they need more performances like that from the rest of their attack. Most of the time Martins and Dempsey can win games on their own, but breaking through bunkering teams is tough, and it requires multiple people to be playing well in order to exploit the cracks in the defenses shell.

Up until this point, the Sounders have lacked that extra step up performance. But in recent weeks Marco Pappa has slowly begun to build up steam. If the rest of the Sounders attack can learn from his performance on Wednesday night bunkering against Seattle will cease to be an effective strategy, and that’s a terrifying thought for the rest of the league who is already looking up the table to see the Sounders on top.

With the prospect of scoring at CenturyLink Field even more daunting this season, visiting teams have largely turned to bunkering. Portland, Sporting Kansas City, and Colorado all packed pretty much packed it in behind the ball, content with a draw and hoping to steal a goal off of a counter.

That’s part of the reason why Seattle fans have seen few goals at home with only eight. Teams have come in and respected the attacking duo of Clint Dempsey and Obafemi Martins. Often they push their center backs up and drop back a CDM solely to clog up space and stop their interplay. Last year the Sounders were able to get around that due to performances by Lamar Neagle and Marco and Marco Pappa, who were also threats on goal.

Sporting KC succeeded in nullifying Sounders threat

With those two and the rest of the Seattle attack starting off slowly this year, teams have been able shift more and more attention to Dempsey and Martins. With teams making good use of this effective strategy, Seattle has been left needing stand out performances from the rest of their eleven in order to come out on top. In Vancouver it was journeyman Chad Barrett stepping up and showing the finishing chops of a man worth twice his wage, home against Portland is was Dempsey’s finishing touch on a Rose shot that made the difference, and against Colorado on Wednesday it was a dominating MOTM worthy performance from Pappa that put them on top.

In each of those games it was stand out performances from a member of the rest of the rest of the starting eleven that ended up giving Seattle the victory. At the current rate this will continue to be visiting teams game plan because it’s largely been effective. Despite ceding Seattle up to 70% possession, if you dedicate the resources to marking Dempsey and Martins out of the game, teams can limit Seattle to one goal because as of right now there isn’t another proven goal threat. Granted Marco Pappa looked great against Colorado and was unlucky not to have helped the Sounders to another goal, but the same thing can be said about Lamar Neagle at Colorado and at the Galaxy.

Therein lies the key. Neagle had a big chance against Sporting to shine, and unlike Barrett in Vancouver did not make the most of it. If Sounders are to be producing more than one goal games that depend on Martins’ shot conversion rate, the supporting cast has to perform.