By J Hutcherson - WASHINGTON, DC (Nov 3, 2011) US Soccer Players -- It had to be a rainy night in Seattle, right? With their season on the line against Real Salt Lake, the Sounders needed the weather on their side. Expecting rain in the Pacific Northwest might not be much of a stretch, but it suited what this game meant. Kasey Keller's final professional game.
Fortunately, it ended in a shutout for Keller. Unfortunately for those of us wanting the storybook ending, it also ended with the Sounders out of the playoffs.
"It's over," Keller said. "It's been a helluva three years. Obviously an honor to be able to come home and play for something as cool as the Sounders have become and were from the first minute. You couldn't have asked for a better end of my career. Yeah, of course, holding up a MLS Cup in a couple weeks would have been tremendous, but you can't fault anybody. We had one of those bad days a couple days ago and came back here and restored a ton of pride. We just came up a tiny bit short."
Years ago, I watched what for me is the classic Keller performance. Arsenal - Leicester City where Keller's goal was bombarded by the Arsenal attack for 90 minutes. I remember five goals against and a shocked commentator trying to workout how to relay the obvious. Keller was blameless on all of them. At Highbury and in front of an international television audience, Keller kept playing even as his teammates crumbled around him.
It was the defense, not the keeper. That might as well serve as the refrain for large stretches of Keller's career.
There's an argument that Keller never really got that top defense in front of him. For the most part, he spent his career with teams in transition. The early American to find himself indispensible to clubs in England and Europe, and for good reason. He made them better.
That's not a 'sweeping past all comers' scenario at the level Keller spent most of his career. Teams don't win championships over there simply because they have a better goalkeeper. However, they do tend to avoid relegation. At the very least, they put up more of a fight on their way down.
Keller as a leader and motivator was an added bonus. On the big afternoons and nights, he led from the back. It didn't always work out, but it was obvious that Keller's various teams knew he was doing all he could to make them competitive.
There are few goalkeepers more attuned to keeping track of threats than Kasey Keller. In a crowded 16-yard box he could be counted on to be in position to make the likeliest lines to goal more difficult. His vision was his strength, positioning himself to make it harder on the approaching attack. At his best, Keller was the type of goalkeeper who frustrated strikers by simply refusing to allow them any advantage. Club or country, a 1v1 battle usually favored Keller. He was never the keeper a striker knew he could beat.
It was more than technique. Keller possessed a gift for disruption. On his own, he could frustrate a free-flowing team cutting through an over-matched defense and bombarding his goal. He might lose, but he would do it while causing the other team to wonder why they weren't winning by more goals and why it took unstoppable shots to get past this guy.
"We scored plenty of goals this year in games," Keller said when asked after the series was over if it really ended 3-0 down in Seattle. "I never thought at any time, as long as I knew we kept it tight, that we'd give ourselves a chance down to the end. You have to give them some credit-that clearance off the line from Jeff Parke off the corner was insane.… Fredy had a great chance and it just skidded away from him right at the very beginning, and that could have been very interesting. But nobody got their head down. We kept battling and battling and battling, got the penalty, then Lamar pops up, great pass from Fredy and knocks it in. And then you think, 'All right, game on.' We battled, they really threw their body on the line, and we just came up a little bit short."
In his final season, Keller never became the old pro counting down his remaining games. Like he said, he kept battling. He had already gotten his parting gifts from the club following the final home game, but in his mind the Sounders and their fans gave him that last appropriate moment. Even if it was a loss on aggregate, to Keller it was exactly the kind of game he wanted to see play out in front of him.
"Two-nil is such a tenuous scoreline in soccer," he said. "It gives you that little bit false sense of security and knowing that it's so obtainable can bite you in the ass. So that's why that third one was a monster, and it ended up being just that. Huge credit to the guys. We came in here and gave everything we had. We sure as hell made it entertaining for everyone to watch, both here and on TV. We came up a little bit short, but it was an honor. The guys did tremendous and I'm proud of each one of them."
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