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| Locked and loaded... |
Well, the Portland Timbers won, beating the cranky, visiting
San Jose Earthquakes 2-0. It wasn’t a terribly inspired win, especially late in
the second half when San Jose bunkered to stop the bleeding. Portland tried to
draw them out by dicking around with the ball outside the bunker, and the ‘Quakes
bit from time to time, but, for the visitors, it was mostly about riding out
the game, minimizing the damage, etc.
To my eye, this game looked a lot like last weekend’s 1-0 loss to the Seattle Sounders, only this time Portland didn’t make a fatal mistake. Portland looked both energetic and the better team, but they didn’t
get a ton of great looks; I mean, I see the eight shots on goal in the boxscore
– and I saw the three shots the Timbers bounced off the posts – but Portland
also racked up 24 crosses, and that feels more true to what I saw last night.
Flip to San Jose’s side and you’ll get a pretty clear sense of how lopsided the
game was. San Jose didn’t do jack – even with many of the players I view as key
suited up, e.g., Anibal Godoy, Marcos Urena, etc. I expected more from them,
personally, but they did get cut off at the knees…
I thought referee Kevin Stott called a weird one – and not
only with the rapid-fire (and, frankly, wrong) pair of yellow cards he dropped
in the same minute to send San Jose’s Darwin Ceren to the showers. Stott would
very indirectly even things out in second half stoppage when he didn’t call a
gapingly obvious penalty when ‘Quakes’ keeper David Bingham tripped Portland’s Fanendo Adi in the box. (Portland scored anyway, so, up yours Stott! (Yeah, go
to hell, buddy!)) It was kind of global, the weirdness, including things like
calling advantage when there wasn’t an advantage worthy of the name, and I
think Stott’s steady failure to call actual fouls in the minutes leading up to
Ceren’s sending off contributed to how he and others (Urena stood out here)
started caroming all around the field. Again, the most important thing a
referee can do is set a tone that keeps the game competitive and minimally
violent. Setting the tone with a second yellow so soon after the first feels a
little like shooting the tenth in a series of jaywalkers to send a message.
Portland still took a while to score – that 13 minutes took
forever, and it’s not just down to halftime sitting in the middle of it – and the
rescue came from the familiar source of a little Maestro Magic. Diego Valeri
and Adi combined on the goal by not really combining – i.e., Valeri popped a
chest-pass toward Adi, who, seeing the Argentine had the better angle/momentum,
left the ball for Valeri – but it was still a quirky little goal. Full credit
to Valeri for poking that home (that’s a deft little flick), but San Jose
really has to wonder why Adi had so much space, and why Victor Bernardez didn’t
run back to cover the angle with, like, a lot more urgency (seriously, that trot
is Liam Ridgewell-esque). The second goal came super-late, and the same two
players combined, and nearly as accidentally.
I’m not crapping on the goals – Valeri’s first required some
quick in-the-moment reading of potentialities – but this wasn’t the kind of
game you sit a group of 12-year-old kids in front of to teach them of The
Beautiful Game. Portland’s offense isn’t quite slumping, so much as it’s lacking
in precision a little, or cutting edge. Call it killer instinct armed with a Nerf baseball
bat…
There’s just not a lot to talk about after that. No real
problems have manifest over the past couple games, and nothing looks broken to
the point where it makes sense to say, “The Timbers really need a blank.” Take
away the fuck up that allowed Seattle’s first goal, and the defense has played
well enough. I noted the state of the Timbers attack above, and I doesn’t leave
all that much to say. It’s basically the same set of guys, playing a
respectable brand of soccer in pretty much the same way they have since flying
out of the gate to start 2017. Adi and Valeri still carry a mildly unnerving
share of the burden of scoring actual goals, the defense remains a good bet for
a random fuck-up in any given game, etc. Until the personnel changes or members
of it start performing visibly better or worse, and over a series of games, I’ll
operate from a standing assumption that the Timbers will keep plugging along,
hopefully to playoff standards.
I’ll close this by flagging a couple players’ performances. Last night, Dairon Asprilla looked as good as he has in Timbers green. He matched up well enough
against Nick Lima to serve a couple decent balls into/across the area; he
popped a header off the post, even if it wouldn’t have counted due to him
fouling a ‘Quake (think it was Lima), and had a couple other good cracks besides. There’s no need to heap praise on
the performance, or, god forbid, to move things around to get Asprilla on the
field as a starter, but, y’know, noted. Asprilla can do stuff out there, and th.
I’m also closer to peace with Zarek Valentin than I have
been since his earliest days with team. Valentin didn’t manifest as a
revelation in his early days, or anything, that just had more to do with seeing
what he could do out there and, honestly, deciding it wasn’t so great. He’s
been steady this season, and nice serve to Valeri for Portland’s opener.
Valentin’s upside has always been apparent (good passer), so a lot of coming
around on him involved seeing him improve as a fullback and, over the past
couple weeks, I’d say he has.
All in all, I’m content. Not excited, but content. The
Timbers look like a mid-table team in a mid-table league. I want them to
improve as much as anybody, and I guess that’s what I’ll watch for. I
understand we have a defender coming in – and that’s swell – but I’m not seeing
that as something transformative. Useful, probably, but even if the defense improves,
I feel the attack needs another gear if Portland is going to do anything big
this season…
…is there a word for the middle ground between pessimism and
optimism?
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