And, if it's been this easy all along...? “The Timbers run unbeaten streak to seven, draw 1-1 with LA”
Ah, the pointless urge to euphemism. That's the text the Portland Timbers' website put over the Recap/Highlights for last night's home draw against the Los Angeles Galaxy. I don't bring up the euphemistic phrasing from a place of disappointment, either, because the Portland Timbers were
bound to drop points at some point, and losing a game is inevitable, even at
home. The educated guesswork I put into Friday’s tweet-storm preview titled me
against the Los Angeles Galaxy as the team to stall Portland’s winning streak, but
they did. Time, now, for the post-accident ritual of checking the vehicle for
dents.
I can name one right away (warning: this is bullshit): I’d got it in
my head that yesterday’s game was Portland’s the last game before Major League
Soccer takes its World Cup Breather. It is not. I’m less surprised about me
boning a detail than I am that people didn't take the time to point it out the error and/or
ridicule me for it (which leads to deeper questions like, does anyone read this stuff?
Eh, barely matters. I think of this site and others as my own Zork-level The
Truman Show (a carefully crafted reality of my very own!), but, to drag this
conversation back on track, the Timbers do have one more game to go (two, if
you count the U.S. Open Cup, and do I count the U.S. Open Cup?), and that’s
against Sporting Kansas City, in Kansas City, next Saturday, and hopefully at a
more reasonable hour. [UPDATE/Correction: Calling all scientists: I've developed a really screwy reading block that causes me to read "at" where I should read versus. The game against SKC next weekend is in Portland, I have no excuse, and thanks to a guy named Justin, who reminded me that I need to correct my stupid. Corrections always appreciated, honestly, especially with such a simple fact. Please read the rest knowing I know that now.]
SKC at their place will be a tough game, and now this becomes a
question about the size of a letdown. Dropping two points in the final game
before the break didn’t seem like much - think stubbing a toe at the end of,
say, the ski run of a lifetime. The team would have a couple, three weeks to
screw their heads back into the straight position, and they’d still have six
reasons for optimism in their back pocket for encouragement. What if the
Timbers close out First Season 2018 (e.g., the one that ends with the World Cup
break, because Apertura is taken), with just that one point taken at home, when
three points looked well within reason? If you’d read this site at all, this
gets back into a favorite game of “blip” versus “pattern.” Time to keep
checking for dents…
Here’s my big takeaway on yesterday: the reason that Portland
stumbled yesterday resides somewhere between their consistent failure to
anticipate where the ball would go better than LA and, crucially, the reason
for that. This showed up early - e.g., with the catch-in-yer-throat moment when
LA’s Chris Pontius slipped ahead of Larrys Mabiala to toe one off the post.
That about being the runner-up too often became the norm by the end of the
game.. The Timbers still found their spaces on the field - and even set players
loose in wide-open pastures behind the LA defense (especially down LA’s right)
- but LA also had a really solid afternoon of cutting out passes to Timbers
players who waited for the ball to come all the way to them. They also started
gobbling up the outlet passes Portland has relied on to start the counters the
team has feasted on throughout the, ahem, six game winning streak*. The
question is why?
(* I am holding onto that with the care and veneration
typically reserved for holy relics - and, yes, I keep my One True Toenail of
St. John Chrysostom in an appropriate vessel.)
From the optimists’ side, maybe the Timbers just came out
complacent, the confidence built up during their run souring to cockiness. For
sunnier optimists, maybe the way they were receiving passes had worked in the
past - i.e., letting the ball sink against the foot, and using it as a pivot
worked like sling-shotting your space vessel around that nearby sun, in that it
kept Portland’s transition move forward as fast as it has. Portland’s
transition didn’t flow forward as fast this week as in weeks past, and it’s
tempting to dismiss that on the grounds that the team still found their share
of openings, only to fail to produce (e.g.). Their shots from the left -
thinking Andres Flores' and Diego Chara’s (which I'm now noticing, are very different approaches) - looked their best crafted chances,
and that’s another part of the story: as much as I shit on LA’s defense during
the game (once; it was one tweet), the Timbers created more openings than
chances, and too many of those chances fired half-blind through traffic. When
push came to shove, LA didn’t give Portland a whole hell of a lot to shoot at,
and I think that’s another story of this game. There is, however, at least one
more:
“it gives Andres Flores an opportunity to go down.”- Alejandro Moreno, commenting from the corner of ESPN and Peculiar Eccentricity
The Timbers could have lost this game. That wouldn’t have
been the end of either world or season, but that penalty kick unquestionably
bailed out the “unbeaten streak.”
First, and with my apologies to the perfectly nice couple I
conversationally ambushed in the bar (i.e., I asked their thoughts, got them,
and walked away while they were still talking) right after “the foul,” I’m still
not sure I would have called that a penalty. Glad the Timbers got it, for sure, but I’ve watched it half a dozen times
now and think I could watch it 24 times more, and I’d still go back and forth
as to whether that was a penalty. Does it matter? Not particularly, or unless something
else intervenes. Both teams picked up a point and stayed reasonably in touch
with their current, respective goals (for Portland, top of the table; for LA,
inside the playoff cutoff), but Portland has 22(?) games to go, and LA 20. FC
Dallas is the top team in the Western Conference, just five points ahead of
Portland, and the Timbers have the game in hand besides. On paper, the Timbers
look fine. Still, is that everything that’s happening?
The pivot here is whether the Portland Timbers will be the
same team on the other side of this summer’s World Cup break. In that context,
today was a data point.
LA clearly took the field today with some sense as to how to
stop Portland, and that opens the possibility that LA won less because Portland
came out flat, but by way of a good and well-executed game-plan. It could have
been simple as defending deeper (well, in general), but it looked more like
trying to keep the team’s shape and pushing to challenge every ball -
especially the outlet passes as often as LA figured out where they’d come from.
The Timbers haven’t been this stymied in a while, and that should make you
wonder, because, for all its faults, this (roughly) same starting eleven has
been good - and on both sides of the ball over the last couple games. The
biggest difference I can come up with is the absence of Andy Polo - which begs
questions of its own (can he matter that much?) - LA made the Timbers look
uncomfortable on one end (defense) and stymied on the other (offense) in a way
Timbers fans haven’t seen in a while. Sebastian Blanco, Diego Valeri and Samuel
Armenteros all ran headlong into LA’s “get-that-shit-out-of-my-kitchen”
approach to defending only to bounce off it for most of the day (another
question, was the fact only Flores and Chara got clean looks something other than
an accident?) I’m lingering on this as long as I am because it counter-punches
against one this season’s woolier senses of comfort - that opposing teams haven’t
yet figured out to how to play against the Christmas Tree. I mean, what if the
holidays are over, guys?
I thought the three-man wall of Cristhian Paredes, Diego
Chara, and [Guy Who Starts, Flores tonight] would keep the Galaxy from
attacking Portland’s defense from the top of the attacking third. It didn’t. If
they could stuff Romain Alessandrini and Emanuel Boateng, I figured that would LA
managed just fine, and mostly down Zarek Valentin’s side (and he still had a damned solid game), but, all in all, I was surprised to LA forced the back four to
defend as much as it did, and mostly because they’d done so well with keeping the
ball away from the back four. To tie together all the above, is it possible
that the LA Galaxy just drafted the blueprint on how to unlock Portland’s
defensive scheme? What if every team in Major League Soccer now has some vague
coordinates to Portland’s weaknesses?
All this thought sort of slipped my mind as a possibility during
the Timbers’ 6-game winning streak, sort of subsumed in the idea that Portland
will always figure out a way. They sort of did and sort of didn’t yesterday -
see notes on the penalty above - but what I’ll be looking for in those first
few games after the break are signs of teams trying to stop Portland the same
way LA did…and…hold on. Huh. I just realized that I’ve been inflating the World
Cup Break into something larger than what it is, e.g., a glorified bye week. Well…shit.
There goes 67% of a thesis. At any rate, SKC is just the first of three straight
tough-shit games - the Timbers follow with Atlanta United FC in Atlanta and the
Seattle Sounders in Seattle (yeah, I know; I always assume the worst/best in
rivalry games) - and that’ll be a testing time. It’s possible this edition of
the Timbers will settle into a pattern - e.g., I expect them to do better
against teams that play a high line (New York City FC and LAFC…maybe?), while wondering
if the Timbers won’t always either struggle, or slip to the wrong side of
predictability, against teams that don’t leave them…just huge amounts of space in
which to run on the counter.
Well, there you have it. Two and a half pages to say, “I don’t
really know.” All in all, I’d gotten so used to seeing the Timbers win that I
slipped into complacency. In the best of all possible worlds, the same thing
afflicted the team yesterday. On the positive side, (finally) putting the next
game in context shrank its importance a little. I wouldn’t expect the Timbers
to beat SKC on the road this season, so that’ll help me take it in stride. As
much as anything else, I’m be looking for the Timbers to look like a team with
all four wheels back on track…
…and if I don’t see that, then I’ll start worrying.
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