U.S. Open Cup, Portland Timbers 1-0 Los Angeles Galaxy: Good is Good, And That's Good

What Portland defeated tonight, helpfully translated.

Just real quick, in a fit of enthusiasm, I want to talk about the Portland Timbers' 1-0 win over the Los Angeles Galaxy in the U.S. Open Cup. This’ll be bullet-style (will it?) and refreshingly straightforward, but also stylistically frustrating. I walk the line…

When I talk about the Timbers being “good” - even in a post like the last one, where I’m shoving a ceiling on top of the conversation - a game like tonight is exactly what I’m talking about. This Timbers team is organized, it knows what it’s doing out there, and it has reasonable flexibility on top of all that. That’s how a team wins a “Cup” tournament - and, yes, I’m talking U.S. Open and MLS, if the stars line-up right - only Giovanni Savarese and staff haven’t figured out how to weaponize that yet, into the unstoppable force that wins titles without blinking. But it’s working well enough, like, nine games in a row well enough.

More to the point, Portland plays well. The team moves the ball to where it wants it to go well enough that I can poo-poo possession like the mediocre appetizer it is. The coolest detail comes with how they came up with a smart way to play the ball forward out of the back, especially against teams that press - i.e., diagonally, and outside-in; it doesn’t just beat the first line of pressure, it means the team can switch the play, or keep it on the same side.

After that, this Timbers team gets vertical real goddamn fast.

Also, Portland is fine without Darlington Nabge. I’m still trying to figure out if it’s not better.

Back to this particular Open Cup tie, LA came into this game 3-1-1…on that, um, just checked the opposition across that time (e.g., @ MTL, v. SJ, V. FCD (this was the loss; noted), @ Portland (the draw, and one of Portland’s flattest games of the season), v. RSL), and I take back what I was about to say, LA wasn’t quite so much on a tear as a run of reasonable expectations with good fortune riding in the side-car. LA is adequate at this point, maybe even playoff-reasonable, but that 3-1-1 amounts to getting results any team with a remote chance of success should get. In other words, this is a result to celebrate for the Timbers, but not get cocky about.

For those who do want to feel cocky, on the other hand (not judging; I’m raising my hand in that tentative way people do when they only think they know the answer), think about how Portland managed the keep-away, how they passed well almost as often as they did, the fact they created - what? - 4-5 quality chances, and that’s at a minimum. The defense cleaned up what it couldn’t prevent from coming in - and hats off and thrown on the ground in gratitude for the mighty, reverse goal-line header by Mabiala to make Portland’s one goal stand up.

Just to note it, even with Liam Ridgewell out, Portland has a decent four-man deep rotation in central defense right now: Mabiala, Tuiloma, Julio Cascante, and (worst-case) Lawrence Olum.

Sticking with Olum, he’s sorta quietly brilliant as an all-‘round defensive plug-in. For what it’s worth, I think Savarese played him in his best spot tonight - e.g., a purely defensive midfielder, one that can, say, compact into the back line if a fullback deploys or goes forward.

To elaborate, I believe this team is built on something close to a statically defensive back-four. With Olum in the line-up, the team basically plays a five-man back-line, a unit that can almost always risk sending one man forward so long as they shift. Just…think about it.

The most promising part of tonight’s line-up didn’t come with playing two forwards (Adi and Samuel Armenteros), but with what Savarese using two (basically?) box-to-box midfielders on either side of Olum in Andres Flores and Diego Chara. Blanco didn’t have to worry about defending much (and yet he did), and neither did Armenteros nor Adi (and yet they did), but playing Olum - or, let’s face it, David Guzman - between Chara and [HIGH-ENDURANCE GUY], looks like a really promising way to let the Timbers flex forward (and also create overloads in the channels) better than they have so far this season.

At first blush I’d argue, don’t let the two-forward set fool you, because it’s not so different from the Christmas tree formation - basically, the difference between the 4-3-2-1 and a 4-3-1-2. If you watched tonight, though, you saw enough of Adi (especially) dropping deep for the ball, and to the point where the Timbers’ formation tonight could have been described as a 4-3-3.

I think all of those formation mean roughly the same thing, basically.

OK, pull what you will out of all o’ that. Bottom line, though, Portland won tonight and deserved to. If I had to name best players for the current season, I would, no shit, say Zarek Valentin, Mabiala, and Blanco. The old guard is doing just fine too, and that’s why this team is just a little balance shy of a solid-to-great season.

The Timbers have enough quality that they’ll be tough to beat for the rest of the season. The only question left is how readily and often they can shift the ball into the attack.

Bottom-line: this is getting interesting.