Sounders put on a masterclass against Inter Miami

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The Sounders have done it. MLS Cup winners. Here comes Ruiz Diaz through the middle to crowd it for Seattle. The Sounders. thought process in terms of who you decided to use and who you didn't? Ever since Senator Hart wrote a commentary that we didn't take outcome seriously.

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Welcome back to another episode of Nos Adientes, part of the Sounder at Heart podcast network, sponsored by Full Pool Wines, Hacks and Ferments, and our subscribers. Just wanted to get on here and... Throw something down. I know it's been a little longer than I would have liked, especially after the League's Cup final. We've been very busy pumping out content. In fact, I am doing this episode solo because Aaron and I are planning on doing a mailbag podcast.

on thursday and i just wanted to make sure that we had something on the record talking about the league's cup final and so i'm trying something a little bit different here uh obviously lick it is going to be producing this one so i want to thank him as well But this is basically just me going off on the League's Cup. Hopefully you guys appreciate that. Hopefully I touch on some subjects that we have not already done. I did a whole bunch.

with lobbing scorchers on their live post game show. That was a lot of fun. I absolutely recommend going to listen to that. It's like four and a half hours long. It holds up pretty well. We had a lot of good times anyway. I'm Jeremiah Shan and let's get into this. It was really a storybook performance from the Sounders from the very beginning of the week in the buildup when Brian Schmetzer.

is talking about they have Messi, but we have Paul Rothrock. Yes, I realized that wasn't the whole quote, but they were feeling it. They welcomed this. embraced the challenge. And never was that more obvious than when they did this Paul Rothrock jersey swap with Messi, where they invited fans to bring in their Messi jersey and...

trade it in for a Paul Rothrock kit. It was glorious. It was an idea. I have to say it did come from the sounder at heart discord. I will say that if you are a sounder sicko. You got to get into the discord. It is amazing in part because people are throwing around ideas like this. And not only are they throwing around ideas like this, but they get into the hands of Sounders ownership, not directly from me, admittedly, but.

That's how this came to be. Someone had this idea. I shared it with a Sounders media person. He sent it up the food chain, and a day later, it was a real thing. And the Sounders made 100 trades of these jerseys. And this is all before the game. The Sounders embraced this challenge. They got excited about not just, they didn't want to promote come watch Messi, but they put an interesting spin on it. And I think that really ended up setting the table for this whole thing. It was...

as much fun as I have ever had at a Sounders game. I'm not going to say that this was more important than Champions League or a better performance than MLS Cup in 2019, but this was something special on its own, and you really had to be there. But if you weren't... I want to talk about it a little bit more. So I have to admit walking up to this game that there were.

a lot more messy jerseys than I had anticipated. I know people have been saying, oh, this might be a big messy crowd, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, nah, it's going to be like 99% Sounders fans, maybe 1% Miami fans. It was not that. It was. It was a bigger split than I had anticipated. But it was nothing like the 60-40 split that some people were expecting or saying that they were going to be. I would say maybe 85-15. All right. But once the cheering happened, once anything that.

required feedback from the audience from the crowd it was it it may as well have been 100 sounders fans there people were booing messy they were chanting who who who are you who are you when messy got announced on the on the starting lineup. It was great. I absolutely loved it. And fans were not there to pay deference to Messi, to pay deference to Luis Suarez and Sujir.

Sergio Busquets or Jordi Alba and anyone else that was out there. They were not here to make Miami feel special. No, they wanted to make this feel like a road game, which it very much was.

And it was what was funny was seeing it was almost surreal to see the lineup that the Sounders put out in contrast to Miami, who has all these European players who have. who have been there, who have played on the biggest stage. And here it is, the Sounders who are missing Jordan Morris. They're missing Albert Rusnak. They're missing Danny Masovsky. They're missing Nuhu and a bunch of other players who could have started.

But they even with all those players missing all along, I was confident that they were going to be able to figure this thing out. And that's what they did. I'm going to say that's mostly. because of Obed and Christian, but Jamar and Reagan also had really good games. Pedro de la Vega, who we just found out, was apparently told by Messi that he will never play for the national team as long as he's involved.

which is kind of crappy sort of smack talk in the game. But what are you going to do? Messi was feeling petulant. He was feeling frustrated. And I think the fact that he said that... is sort of just indicative of how out of his game he felt. I don't know. Maybe he does that to everyone, but certainly we don't hear about it all the time. And it was kind of cool to see. And.

The Sounders were absolutely just masterful in the way that they are harassing Messi and they weren't giving Luis Suarez any space. There were two good looks in this game. One of them felt messy. The fact that he missed it, I think... actually speaks to how frustrated he was in this game because he wasn't really ready for that chance when it came to him. The other big chance was Allende, who probably should have done better, but he missed this.

Miami had two good looks. They didn't convert them. The Sounders had more than two good looks. They didn't convert all of them, but they converted enough. The Sounders. were creating more danger throughout the game. That started almost right away when Osazi de Rosario nearly got on the end of a Jesus Ferreira cross, only for it to just be out of reach. But that didn't matter. The Sounders continued to press.

De Rosario wanted to make good on the next chance that he got, though. And it was a gorgeous cross from Alex Roldan. And... Ozaze just rises up and smashes it into the back of the net, heading it in. Just glorious stuff. And at that point, it really did feel like this might actually happen, that the Sounders were going to.

actually take care of business against Miami while featuring a lineup of guys that mostly came through the academy or defiance. They only, so you, Osase De Rosario playing for the defiance earlier this year. Who else was in here? Paul Rothrock. He was playing for Defiance regularly as recently as last year. They had Reed Baker Whiting, another player who as recently as this year.

has gotten minutes with defiance. That's sort of Andrew Thomas, another player who I don't think he's played for the defiance this year, but really the only starts he's been getting are in.

place of you know seven fry is still the starter on this team as best we can tell at least going into this game i think he was generally considered a starter and at no point did the sounders look like they were intimidated in any way in this game Dave Rosario in particular has been so good in this tournament. That was his fourth goal. He finished second in the golden boot race in league's cup. That's remarkable. This is a player who had never played an MLS as recently as a few months ago.

And now he's leading the line against Lionel Messi. And what's even funnier to think is that at this time last year, I wasn't even sure if De Rosario was an MLS player. I was not super impressed by what he was doing in his first season at Defiance. But then in the offseason, the first thing he does is he goes and suits up for Guiana. He has a hat trick for Guiana against, I believe, Barbados. And then he follows that up with another goal.

And then in the offseason, he goes to Florida and hangs out with Tino Lopez, another Defiance player. And they sort of recommit themselves to being the best player that they can be. He comes into training camp ready to learn. ready to execute. He works with Peter Dahlrimple, who is sort of the Sounders coach who works with their high, sort of like high upside players at Defiance. He becomes a film room fanatic.

He studies the game very, very seriously. He takes everything that the sounders are giving him and he applies it. I've heard more than one person call him a sponge. Anyway, it is absolutely great to see. He's now got 15 goals across all comps between the Sounders and Defiance. He's actually one of three players in the Sounders organization right now who... could potentially break the existing record for most all competition goals in the organization. So I'm including if you...

score for Defiance or Sounders in this thing. The record right now is still Obafemi Martin's 19. Yusuke Nome, he has 16 goals across all comps. That's all for Defiance. And then Danny Masofsky, of course, has 15 for the Sounders. So that's three players who could potentially break this record. None of them are Jordan Morris, weirdly enough. And I just want to say Jordan Morris is having a great season when he's healthy. He hasn't been healthy, obviously. This is not a negative on Jordan Morris.

It's just an observation that there's a lot of players having very good seasons right now. And let's not forget the role that Alex rolled on, not just played on that goal, but... Generally speaking, he was coming off a year where I think it was maybe unfairly maligned. I did not think he was bad last year, but he was not particularly productive on the offensive end. But I think most people probably remember him for the giveaway.

that led to the Galaxy's goal, which was ultimately the game winner in the Western Conference Final. That was probably not a fair way to look at his last year, but this year he has avoided those kinds of high profile mistakes.

And he's just been so good as a sort of defense first right back. But he's still very useful going forward. He's shown his versatility this year. He's also... pretty good going forward what we've seen and in this game he ended up with a goal he has the penalty that uh kind of seals the deal and then he also had the assist to Paul Rothrock which we'll talk about a little bit later uh

Anyway, I could probably just go down the roster. And I think everyone on the team really had a good game in this one. I don't have any complaints. And... I think that one of the commonalities with all these players is sort of the overall vision that this roster was built with.

You know, I've made plenty of comments about how corners seem to be getting cut in terms of spending. And that's not just the transfer budget. That's stuff that's kind of behind the scenes as well. And while I still think that's true, it has forced the front office. to focus on what actually works. Thank you for listening to the Sounder at Heart Podcast Network, which now includes Nos Anietes, Lobbing Scorchers, and The Cooler Guild.

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This team has 16 players on the roster that either came through that came through the developmental pipeline in some way, meaning they either played at least for one of the either the Academy or Defiance, oftentimes both. They had three other players who were drafted out of college and effectively developed by the Sounders too, including Christian Roldan, Alex Roldan, and Andrew Thomas in that group. The ratio is even more skewed if you look at who actually played against Miami.

where 11 of the 15 players who got on the field effectively were developed by the Sounders. Even among the four players, the Sounders can't really claim to have developed. Only Jesus Ferreira is in his first season here. Meaning the Sounders have... have put time and they've kept this group together, but still sort of like developed them. The Sounders took no shortcuts in a relatively young league like MLS. That's not easy to do.

But I think we can see that in the way that the community responded to this game. I don't know that there are any other markets in MLS, even when Messi is on the other side of the field, can sell out 70,000 seats. in really the span of three days. And so I don't know, 70,000, they didn't sell at all 70,000 admittedly in those three days. But I'm guessing that no more than 10,000 had...

sort of chosen the pay-as-you-go option for League's Cup. Maybe let's just say they sold another 10,000 in the lead-up to that game. They probably had to sell close to 50,000 seats to get this to a sellout. and that's what they did it was amazing and they weren't giving away these tickets these tickets as you probably know were selling for

At the starting point, like $100, a lot of these seats in the third deck were selling for over $150. So people really wanted to beat her. Yes, of course, Messi and his buddies being here helped undeniably. That is not the point, though. The point is that these people wanted to come see the Sounders beat Messi. They wanted to be in the house when the Sounders hoisted another trophy. They're ninth in the MLS era. This is the fifth time.

that they've won a trophy at, or actually I should say, a fifth time they've hosted a cup at home. They also won the Supporter Shield at home, which I always like to remind people. So technically, I suppose you could say that they had six. In all six of those matches, let's call the 2014 season finale a cup final two since they were going against the Galaxy. They had to get a point in that game, but they won. The Sounders are 6-0 in those six.

cup finals that we're calling it right here that's pretty amazing a lot of those games have been played in front of huge crowds like this one but none of them were bigger 69 314 people at lewin field and i gotta tell you there's something that feels It's only about two and a half times what normally show up to a game. But I'll tell you, the energy and the vibe around it was exponentially more impressive than two and a half.

It was a reminder of why we do this, why we get excited, why we come to games every time. What's even more amazing is that I think what really ties this all together, I should say. is that this is not a new phenomenon. You can go back to 2009, sure, but you can go all the way back to when Adrian Hanauer took over the club in 2001. This is now the 12th title that they...

that they've won in that time. No one else has done. Actually, I take it back. That's the 13th title they've won in that time. Or if you include their four USL and a league championships. And. And I think that it's fair to include those because there's a genuine through line, you know, more so than any other team in the United States or Canada. The Sounders still have a genuine connective tissue that binds them to every.

every era from 1974 all the way up until now. Ryan Spencer obviously played for the NASL team and Hanauer grew up rooting for them. Goalkeeping coach Tommy Jutra briefly played for the A-League Sounders, but he joined Schmetzer's USL staff in 2006. Wade Weber, the team's director of player development.

even played for FC Seattle in the Western Alliance era that bridged the NASL and A-League areas before playing for the Reborn Sounders and eventually joining the Academy in 2016. All of which is to say, there is a real sense of history because the people who lived it... are still passing along those stories and are able to articulate why the Sounders are different. Not to put too neat of a bow on this, but Inner Miami has none of that.

They have the glitz, the glamour, and lots of legitimately amazing players, but they have no sense of history. I applaud their efforts to try to manufacture some of that, but that's what they're doing. In many ways... It has been successful. They won the 2023 Leagues Cup, and they set the points record on the way to winning the Supporters Shield last year. Miami remain one of the elite teams in MLS, and I have no doubt that on their day, they could have won this game. But this was not their day.

Christian, Obed, Alex, Reed, Jackson, Yamar, Andrew, Jesus, Pedro, Rothrock, and Osase all made sure of that. Brian Schmester put on a masterclass of preparation, motivation, and innovation. It didn't matter that he was missing no fewer than seven players who otherwise would have been expected to play at least some role in this game. Each of his subs worked to absolute perfection, none of which were more inspired than bringing in Georgie Manungu for Jesus Ferreira.

pushing Rothrock to the number nine spot for the last 15 minutes. Only five minutes after Manugu came on, he drew a penalty with his patented dribbling. And of course, it was Rothrock in that number nine role that led to him scoring the goal. that will be replayed for many years to come and tore the roof off of Lumen Field with the explosion of ecstasy it unleashed. The only shame is that so much of this conversation following the match was surrounded by the... surrounded...

around the fight after the whistle. And let's make no mistake. Miami were the instigators and the perpetrators of the worst acts. Luis Suarez, chief among them. I don't need to go through a blow-by-blow of the whole thing. In fact, if you want to read...

A blow-by-blow, I would recommend checking out my story on Sounder at Heart. But the fight seems to have started with him not getting the response he wanted from Obed Vargas while chastising the 20-year-old and then fully spitting on head of security Gene Ramirez. In between that, those two incidents, Sergio Busquets punched Vargas, Thomas Avelez attacked Jackson Reagan, and a bunch of other players looked like petulant crybabies.

I'm sure some Sounders will end up being punished eventually in this whole thing, but that's how these things usually go. But my main fear is that MLS is going to try to wiggle out of taking responsibility by deferring to any league's couple of... by deferring to any League's Cup level punishment. As a soccer public, though, we cannot let that happen. The CBA clearly outlines that Don Garber has the authority to discipline players, regardless of which competition something like this happens in.

especially when it crosses an especially egregious line, as I think everyone agrees happened here. But the more lasting narrative should be entirely focused on the Sounders. There's a lot of daylight between now and MLS club. Plenty of things can change between now and even the start of the playoffs. They are still just 12th in the Supporter Shield standings. Right now, though, the Sounders seem to have built as resilient and deep of a team as any in MLS history.

They faced down the reigning champions of South America, Europe, and CONCACAF, and more than held their own against them. They dismantled Messi in front of 70,000 fans. They trolled Luis Suarez so hard that he melted down on the field. I am excited to see what they do next. This new era, this does feel like a real start of a new era for the Sounders. It is a lot of fun. Everything is not perfect.

I'm not trying to paint too rosy of a picture, but right now it does feel really good to be rooting for this team, to be following this team, to be writing about this team. And I would like to think that. All of you are enjoying it as much as I am. With all that said, I should probably get out of here. I want to say thank you again to our sponsors, Full Pool Wines and Hacks and Ferments. I want to say...

A huge thank you to all of our subscribers. We just finished our August fundraising month. We are way ahead of where we were last year. We are in a very, very good spot. And but I also I also want to encourage everyone. If you're listening to this for free, throw us a little bit of money. Please become a subscriber. The only way that we're able to keep doing this stuff is through people like you.

We want to keep expanding. We want to keep doing more things. And eventually, we'd like to bring on some other actual employees. We have a lot of paid contractors. But right now, I'm essentially doing this as the only employee of Sounder at Heart. So anyway. With all that said, I should probably get out of here. I am Jeremiah Oshan. This is Nos Adietes, part of the Sounder at Heart Podcast Network, and we'll catch you next time.

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