Transcript
Speaker: So this is a night that so many sounders fans have been looking forward to. US Open Cup, a tournament they had owned since coming into Major League Soccer, at Starfire, a place that was an absolute fortress, Seattle unbeaten in all their Open Cup games there, against their hated rivals, the Portland Timbers.
Speaker: dimly lit field, poor surface, 4000 baying fans screaming and throat rasping from only feet away from the players. They can feel them, smell them, almost touch them. It has a little bit of a feel of Mad Max beyond the Thunderdough. Here are these fans in this dimly lit arena, baying for the blood of their opponents.
Speaker: and little would we know that the setting will be overshadowed by the events. So it's special, I think the environment that you're usually playing in, for some reason we seem to always lose the coin flip and so we're at the smaller confines there at Starfire.
Speaker: It's an awesome environment. When you break it down, Starfire is a small European venue, almost high school football, high school soccer. But when you pack the house, it really has a vibrance to it.
Speaker: It hurts my knees and my Achilles tendons in particular just to think about playing on that pitch because it is like they put a bunch of plywood down and then they threw over some green confetti and they just called it a field. I've seen people try to take a yellow card or a red card away from the ref but I've never seen anything like that. I try to keep on going because at the end of the day that's what the fans deserve.
Speaker: There was no way I think a lot of guys would, um, would have turned to Alan. And it's honestly a really proud moment.
Speaker: You realise at the end of it Ziggy Schmidt, the Sounders coach, didn't coach the rest of the game from that Dempsey moment. That he was so riled up at what he'd seen that he took himself away from the coaching position. And I think he went and stood in the bottom quarter of Starfire Stadium and watched there because otherwise, as he was then quoted in the post -match media scrum, he would have quote, choked out the referee, unquote.
Speaker: And that just sums up an evening that the sound has completely lost control.
