Socceresq

A cancelled meeting allowed me the opportunity to head down to the Seattle Sounders’ training facility at the Starfire Sports Complex in Tukwila, Wa. I try to get down at least once per month just to see how things are going. Sometime I get lucky and am there to break some news.

Nothing so interesting this time around, as the Sounders prepare for their next game against Sporting Kansas City on Sunday. The whole team (save Jordan Morris, and some folks I’ll talk about below) were basically out training. Some brief thoughts:

1. Ozzie looks ready: Fully involved in practice and scoring in short-sided drills and being his usual Ozzie-self. Don’t know if he’ll start after being out for the past six months basically, but looking forward to seeing him back on the field.
   
2. Victor Rodriguez and Kim Kee Hee are progressing: They weren’t involved in any of the team training at all, but they were both doing individual work and looked reasonably close to returning. Both were doing drills at speed, in addition to fitness stuff I assume. I won’t estimate a return (I’m neither a doctor nor a trainer), but I’d say they’re relatively close.
   
3. Lots of finishing work: Lots of the drills focused on finishing as you can imagine. The drills mostly involved Dempsey and Bruin, along with Alonso.
   
4. Nouhou to start, maybe: I only base this on one of the defensive drills I observed, which had Nouhou in the back band of four with Torres, Marshall and McCrary. Take that for what it’s worth.
   
5. I didn’t see Tony Alfaro, Alex Roldan, Jordy Delem or Henry Wingo. Starting for S2 tonight, maybe? Wingo was having injury issues I recall, so he may be recovering from that.

The rest of the team was practicing on the far side of the field, so I didn’t see anything else of particular interest. However everyone else appeared to be fully involved in training. Always interesting to watch practice, though I didn’t particularly enjoy the torrential rain and windstorms. Until next time!