Schmid on Gomez, Anderson, Valdez, Friberg, S2

The Sounders returned to training this morning at Starfire. The most notable news was coach Sigi Schmid’s broken fibula. We’ve got his explanation on that in a video below. But there was other news today, so here’s what Schmid had to say on those other topics:

On the mood of the team after 1-1 draw in Houston: It certainly helps scoring that goal. … There are ties that are good ties, ties that are not good ties. This was definitely a good tie. Now we’ve gotten two games that we’ve gotten points out of, haven’t lost. Now we’ve got to build on that at home.

On Herculez Gomez: I thought Herculez did well. He’s a veteran player, so he made good decisions. He came in and I thought found some good spaces for us and played well.

On Oalex Anderson: I thought Oalex did well also. He brought us that seed coming off the bench. He’s a guy who can come off the bench and find the game fairly quickly, and Herculez did that too, and that’s always something good to know. Do they push themselves further ahead at this stage? You never know. Houston was pretty tired in the second half. They were a little bit gassed – why, I don’t know, but for some reason. So the game was also a little bit easier then. But certainly Oalex’s speed and Herculez’s decision-making help us.

On Anderson playing for S2 last night: We wanted him to play a little bit. He’s still building his fitness. He missed a lot of preseason, so he’s still building his fitness. He’s a young guy, so we felt 30-to-45 minutes wasn’t going to hurt him last night in preparation for Saturday.

On how many minutes Gomez could handle: I couldn’t really say. At this stage I think he’s probably 45 for sure, probably 60.

On one goal from forwards through five games: Obviously we need to get more goals. Like I’ve said, we’ve been around it. Early cross from Joevin Jones that just missed Morris coming in at the near post. Kovar misses by 6 inches to a foot. We just need some of those plays to go in. But on the same token, we also need to make more chances for ourselves, some of those final dangerous chances, that’s what we’re going to work on this week.

On possible returns of Erik Friberg and Nelson Valdez: We’ll see. Today was their first day training with us. They’ve done a little bit of work with S2. So we’ll see what the reports say.

On new Sounders 2 defender Nouhou Tolo: Nouhou has been here for a while. He trained with us while we were waiting for his (paperwork from Cameroon). But he was definitely a guy ... that we wanted to bring back. He’s a young outside back, so we thought he had some qualities for the future.

This story was originally published April 13, 2016 at 3:34 PM with the headline "Schmid on Gomez, Anderson, Valdez, Friberg, S2."