Wednesday night’s match between the Seattle Sounders and San Jose Earthquakes at CenturyLink Field was probably not, in any objective sense, good soccer, but it absolutely was a delightfully strange hot mess of a 90 minutes. The game ended in a 2-2 draw but easily could’ve been 4-4, and the result should please San Jose fans, who suffered through a difficult season last year but so far are showing spikes of promise in the early going.



Part of the game’s unpredictable nature was due to the middle-of-the-week scheduling. MLS’s salary cap comes at the cost of depth, and coupled with a short period rest after the weekend, things tend to get weird on school nights. (Or maybe the game took place in some kind of extradimensional time warp triggered by the old-school NASL origins of this particular matchup; the throwback scoreboard graphics were a particularly nice touch.)



A likelier explanation would be that each team is going through its own...