Columbus Crew SC 2-2 Portland Timbers: I'm Beginning to See the Light, Here it Comes, Woo-Oooh-Oooh

Here it fucking comes....

I don’t believe in moral victories, as a rule, and I’m not going to take that route for this review. To be clear, that doesn’t mean that the Portland Timbers didn’t play a damn good and wonderfully entertaining game tonight. In fact, the fact they punched even with, for all their present faults and fatigue, a consensus-best team in MLS raises Portland’s 2-2 draw at Columbus Crew SC into disappointment territory. Coulda, shoulda, woulda, etc.

Going the other way, consider how disappointed Columbus fans feel tonight and, to float a guess I may or may not confirm the The Massive subreddit tomorrow, how flaming pissed they are at everyone’s favorite ref, Ted “Drunk” Unkel. In a press conference after the Timbers’ frustrating home draw against Los Angeles FC last weekend (who's ready for the encore?), head coach Phil Neville voiced some hope that calls would break his team’s way over the run of the season. I’m not saying that process tilted toward justice tonight, I’m not saying I care, I only know Felipe Mora either had more time on the ball tonight or he got the call when he got knocked down (if by sleight of body, here and there). After that, Unkel called the usual game that only he sees through whatever contacts he’s wearing…like a goddamn random number generator with a pocket full of reds and yellows, I tell you…

Most and best of all the things about tonight’s game, yes, Roman gladiator guy, I was entertained. Both teams rewarded their fans with two top-shelf goals a piece – more on that later – the game had a lively one-team-giveth-the-other-taketh-away tension, and, typing strictly as a homer, the Timbers played their second solid game in a row. It’s not showing in the standings – hello(!), 11th in the West – and I hope to see the Timbers get all three points next week at LAFC with the desperate fervor of a 10-year-old battling against all the odds and even more doubts that the Tooth Fairy still pays a fiver-per-tooth, but I’m closer to believing the Timbers have a competitive team than I’ve been since that little flutter of hope the Timbers had during Miles Joseph’s short, interim reign. Hell, I’m willing to shout that all the way back to 2021.

To their credit, Portland exceeded the broadly conservative approach I laid out in my scouting report. Even better, they granted my wish for more robust defending over an opening 20-25 minutes that saw them go up 1-0 on top of frustrating the bejesus out of the Crew.

Columbus Crew SC Scouting Report: We Have Seen the Enemy and All I Can Say Is...Shit.

Yes, that is Wilfred Nancy.

Full disclosure, I haven’t spent much time on Columbus Crew SC this season. Didn’t see the point. They’ve been getting results…until recently (but they also got arguably the biggest result) and the roster remains…stacked. At any rate, I have done some scouting and here is my report.

Some Basics

Columbus currently sits at fourth in the Eastern Conference (7th overall, fwiw) on 13 points and a 3-1-4 record. They remain stoutly unbeaten at home (3-0-1) and stubborn on the road (0-1-3; also, the loss at Charlotte FC has been dismissed as, in a word, bullshit) and boast one of the deepest and, currently, healthiest top-to-bottom roster in MLS and, in Wilfred Nancy, they have a head coach that gets the neutrals drooling. One can’t really blame the local fans for being content to the point of cockiness…and yet there are some questions.

They’re winless over the past four league games and arguably dropping points when they shouldn’t e.g., at Charlotte (loss), at a badly-hurting Nashville SC (a draw), and, insofar as you buy them, v DC United (draw). If you dig in a little deeper, you see a fall-off from 2023’s killer attacking pace of 1.97 goals/game; with just 10 goals scored in league play all season, they’re puttering around at 1.25 goals/game and, if you hit the link about contentment above, you’ll see creeping concerns that things ain’t the same without Cucho Hernandez. Then again, most signs point to him returning to the lineup after a wee suspension for some kind of tomfoolery.

The Lineup(s)

Unless I’m mistaken, Nancy has yet to deviate from a 3-4-2-1 formation, even when he rotates the squad dizzy as he did last week at Real Salt Lake. Were I a betting man – which I’m not, on the grounds that me putting money on anything means the opposite will happen – I’d expect Columbus to play the same lineup they did for their March 10 game against Chicago.

Portland Timbers 2-2 Los Angeles FC: A Meditation on Cherry-Flavored Cough Syrup

This image was called "cuddling a cow," also, yes!

Thus endeth another case study in what might have been. The game turned on a justified red card to Portland Timbers goalkeeper, Maxime Crepeau (it sure looked like Claudio Bravo kept Los Angeles FC’s Denis Bouanga onside; more on him later), and all it took from there was Mateusz Bogusz’s 51st (damn good) minute free-kick to lead to Solomon splitting the baby at one point a piece. Not much happened between there and the final whistle, if with one exception.

The Timbers got lucky to escape with the 2-2 draw because Nathan Ordaz committed no crime ahead of what looked like a last-gasp winner for LAFC. I’m a good partisan and, as such, I don’t blow air into the cow’s nose when it doesn’t shit in my living room, or however that saying goes. To put that another way, Portland may have got lucky on that one call, but they made their luck otherwise and that feels like an improvement over several of the games I’ve seen so far this season. Also, who invited the fucking cow?

If I had to name the most maddening element of the Timbers 2024 season, it follows from the fact that every result comes loaded with too many caveats to make sense of where things stand with them. Today, it was the red card, but it has been playing from a hole measured by one to three goals in earlier outings. This game provided the usual divide of positives and negatives – and I’ll get to some of them (jetlagged AF, honestly) – but my biggest personal positive comes from the Timbers going up, first, 1-0, then 2-1 on two…respectable goals from open play. I’m shading both of those, and for reasons I’ll get into, but, all in all, today’s draw might have been the Timbers most complete game of 2024.

If you’re with me, let’s run over this hill screaming! Aaaauugggghhhhh!!

The Portland Timbers, at My (First) Break of 2024

It's early and the outcome is uncertain.

Between being 24+ hours late and a lack of inspiration, I never got around to posting something on the Portland Timbers’ 2-3 loss to the Vancouver Whitecaps. On the whole, that loss borrowed details from the handful of games that came before – e.g., the borderline paralytic slow start called back to the loss at New York City FC and, with a nod to the home loss to the Philadelphia Union, Portland's defense found fresh, new ways to give up stupid goals. The only thing missing was the failure to put away good chances that pissed away the piteous road loss at Houston Dynamo FC.

With that in mind – and because I’m taking the next week off - of which, damn the timing, because the road game at Sporting Kansas City strikes me as the most important game of this young season – I wanted to put a pin in where things stand for the Timbers in…let’s call them the teenage years of the 2024 MLS season.

To start, I see these as the dominant questions facing the team:

1) Defensive Boners. (That’s right, I called ‘em boners.) The Timbers gave up six goals over the past two games. Each revealed a unique flaw in Portland’s defense, depending on how you held it to the cold, hard light of a slow-motion replay, but, to skip the metaphors and put it bluntly: giving up even two goals hobbles a team to limping; giving up three is the soccer equivalent of a death wish. It just has to improve. Like next weekend.

2) Will Portland’s Real Midfield Please Stand Up? Because I live and participate on the Timbers subreddit, I hereby acknowledge that plenty of Timbers fans hold a version of Portland’s midfield in their head that is both ideal and available to play. More or less. (How is Eryk, btw?) I’m taking the fact that multiple candidates exist as evidence that the question of the ideal midfield has not yet been settled. I can’t name one myself, I just know that my best current midfield has some game-wrecking teeth in it…which means, sure, I’d try to start Cristhian Paredes and David Ayala, or even keep starting Diego Chara and experiment with those two as second-half subs. The bigger issue revolves around…

MLS Week 6 Review, an Early Assessment of the Standings

EXTREME Seal Experience was the best I could do...

Between nearly every team in Major League Soccer having five to six games in the bank (Don's Golden Boys, Miami, have seven), a week off coming up for me, and another so-so self-destructive game by my Portland Timbers this past weekend (and should that read “so, so destructive” or “so-so, destructive”?), I’ve decided to use this Week 6 review to take stock of where things are all round. As for the point of it all, it comes from a thought exercise around where Portland fits into the big picture of the Western Conference – i.e., how much room for experimentation/failure they’ve got. The same exercise should work the same for your local team, too, so I went nuts and fleshed out some data for the Eastern Conference as well.

I think the format and information speaks for itself. Every team in the league is listed below and blurbed over in the order of the present standings, along with their record and top-level statistics. The next line talks about how closely I’ve watched the given team this season – there, G = watching a 50+ minutes of a game plus checking the box score and H = reviewing the highlights and checking the box score – and, as you’ll see, I ignore multiple games entirely (they’re not paying me, I’m getting too old for this shit; now picture me swinging on a vine with an explosion in the background). The final section in each blurb gives a vague, overall impression of the team I’m what I’m basing it on.

With that, time to dig in, starting with the…

Western Conference

1st - Los Angeles Galaxy

Facts: 12 pts., 3-0-3, 13 gf, 9 ga (+4), Home 1-0-2, Away 2-0-1

How Well I Know Them: HGHGG (i.e., two highlights reviews and three game reviews)

The Overall Impression: Balanced, capable, and they’ve got a third-hand kind of attack to throw the punch you can’t see coming: everything I’ve seen and read treats the Galaxy as legit. To anyone arguing they haven’t played a tough schedule, I’d counter with everything looks tough to a team that’s missed the playoffs four of the past six seasons. Barring traumatic injury [Ed. – NOTE: Read this though into literally every entry below.], the Galaxy may not finish this high, but they look like a great bet to finish high – i.e., the top 3.

Vancouver Whitecaps Scouting Report: What to Do When You're Expecting a Land War in Asia

Imagine him running to you in a field of wildflowers.

Why not? Let’s see if we can’t get things entirely wrong for the third straight week…

Some Basics

The Vancouver Whitecaps got off to an impressive 2-1-1- start in 2024, if with the curiosity of both wins came on the road – and with impressive goal differentials too (3-1 at FC Dallas and 2-0 at the San Jose Earthquakes; also, yes, both team tripped out of the gate). Home games have been less kind, yielding just one point from a home game against Charlotte FC and and bupkiss against Real Salt Lake just last weekend. Vanni Sartini has committed to a 3-4-3 throughout, if with variations, but he hasn’t been on the sidelines until (checks watch) this weekend. Maybe that gives them a boost, maybe it doesn’t; I just know I’m pulling for the latter.

On the numbers side, they’re holding steady at one goal allowed per game and pushing two goals for, but, again, the goals haven’t come at home, which, to be fair, could be nothing more complicated than playing tougher teams at home than they have on the road.

Some familiar names remain in the lineup – e.g., Ryan Gauld, of course, and who doesn’t know the man who’s played for every team in MLS by now, Fafa Picault – but there’s a real possibility that another familiar name, Brian White, will sit this one out in concussion protocol. That would be a tragedy for one of MLS’s great everyman players, if it comes to that, but it would be a timely let off for the Timbers? To anyone looking for why that is, I give you Exhibit A, aka, his assist on Vancouver’s lone goal against RSL. Speaking of…

The Review

I have a little more to work with in terms of how the ‘Caps have scored goals in 2024 and crosses, and approaching wide in general, look like the most popular paths. They commit numbers when they do go forward, loading the box with as many as five players and even sending in a sixth for good measure (see here), so Portland’s midfielders need to stay frosty on those late runs. Fortunately, that plays to one of Portland’s strengths, aka, Zac McGraw who bosses the aerial game like few players in MLS. It doesn’t eliminate it by any stretch, Vancouver can always play the ball where he isn’t, but that’s a decent plus to have in the back pocket.

MLS Week 5: Surprises, Pleasant and Unpleasant

Do, or eat, the things that make you happy.

Grand Narrative

First, we’re in the magical time on Major League Soccer’s calendar when nearly every team can talk themselves into believing they’ve got a shot at something better than last season. Hell, they’ve got Minnesota United FC as a live example. That has a lot of teams playing wide open and I love that like Paula Dean loves butter!

Some teams play open and wild and don't go far as they'd like – I’d lump Chicago Fire FC and, if they had any other way of playing besides pedal-to-the-metal, I’d go with DC United and St. Louis CITY FC – and, on the flip side of the same token, that’s why you’re seeing some hot names from 2023 continuing to smolder in 2024, aka, the Ohio teams, aka, FC Cincinnati, Columbus Crew SC. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some surprises, pleasant and unpleasant – beyond Minnesota, you’ve got Red Bull New York, Toronto FC, and a rejuvenated Los Angeles Galaxy team on the pleasant side, and Inter Miami CF on the unpleasant side, because fuck those guys – but I’m still seeing at lot of the usual suspects careening this way and that in the demolition derby already taking shape in the middle of the table.

Even so, the biggest surprises arguably lurk at the bottom of both conferences. I mean, yes, of course you have the San Jose Earthquakes and Austin FC in their natural state (sucking wind, lagging behind), but dream of the riches you’d see had you bet anyone that the Seattle Sounders and New England Revolution would be at the bottom of their respective conferences and playing like they’ll be rooted there for some time.

That’s it for the preamble, only the round-up remains. I believe the format explains itself with the exception of the symbols you’ll see after each result below (all of which include a link to The Mothership’s game summary for the relevant match). Here those are:

* more or less skipped it, coasting on the fumes of past impressions.

(H) – I watched the highlights and checked the box score to update the opinion.

({Numbers]) – those represent the parts of the full game I watched, before raiding the box score.