SEATTLE – Seattle Sounders center back Chad Marshall has largely made his name in MLS due to his propensity for preventing goals, as evidenced by his distinction of being the only three-time recipient of the league’s Defender of the Year award.
This season, however, the 32-year-old is proving that he’s anything but one-dimensional. Marshall’s game-deciding tally in the 24th-minute of Seattle’s 1-0 victory over the Chicago Fire on Wednesday was his fourth of the season, a total that equals his scoring output from the past five seasons combined.
Marshall told reporters he didn’t have a concrete explanation for this season’s surge in offensive production after the game. But he did single out the service of free-kick wizard Andreas Ivanschitz -- who picked up the assist on Wednesday’s goal off a corner kick -- as one possible contributing factor.
“I think it’s just having someone like [Ivanschitz] on the ball who can consistently serve good balls in the box,” Marshall said. “We’ve got a few other big dudes in the air who cause problems and free up space. We’ve been working really hard in training on it too.”
Sounders interim coach Brian Schmetzer also said that Marshall has been one obvious beneficiary of Ivanschitz’s pinpoint corners, adding that the presence of a similarly physically imposing center back in Roman Torres might also be giving Marshall some more space to work.
“Teams now have to go after Roman, which frees up Chad,” Schmetzer said. “You have [Alvaro] Fernandez, who’s good in there and Jordan Morris, who’s a big body, and then a guy who swings the ball in really well. I think that creates problems for other teams.”
Regardless of the reasoning, Marshall’s tally on Wednesday now means that the Sounders are officially in playoff position for the first time in a 2016 season that saw them endure a brutal start to this campaign that culminated in the departure of longtime head coach Sigi Schmid in July.
“I haven’t been looking at the standings this whole season,” goalkeeper Stefan Frei said. “When you’re losing games, you know where you’re finding yourself. It’s nice to know we’re stringing together results and you can sense you’re going up, but by no means can we let off the pedal at this point. It would be the worst thing for us to do.
“We’ve worked hard to give ourselves a chance to get into the playoffs and we have to make sure that hard work counts.”
