Portland Timbers 1-0 Sporting Kansas City: A Win in March (or February) and Everything That Was Wrong with It

If I had to declare a star for the evening of the Portland Timbers’ season-opening 1-0 win over Sporting Kansas City, I’d go with the opening goal. I mean, that thing felt like the first kiss after love after love at first sight, something that left you dreaming of all the great things to come and believing they’d come true.

And then the rest of the game happened and, just like that, that same young couple is sitting at the back of the bus marveling at how all that frisson fizzled out.

There isn’t much to say about this game in either a short or long narrative. Once you take away a couple hiccups of excitement here and there, after Juan David Mosquera effectively willed in the game’s one and only goal – and by playing both sides of the ball in the same move, mind you – the game settled into an unwelcome pattern.

In a phrase, every good thing Portland managed to get going wilted over time. While that mostly took form of one Timbers player or another doing good things and leading a charge to somewhere promising, the malaise had a kind of global feel about it – say like someone running up a hill, heart bursting with courage screaming, “who's with me?!" only to realize he's leading, at most, a two-man charge. Or, to reach for another metaphor, the whole game felt like a metaphor for autumn, only some place shitty instead of, like, New England where leaves on the trees pop like fireworks in October (and with less of a fire risk; good stuff).

If there’s a plus side to this whole thing...guys(!), the Timbers kept a clean sheet! And, yeah, I get the impression that he’s popular as a narc as a high school party with a lot of Timbers fans, but stand-in ‘keeper David Bingham deserves a real share of the credit for that. He came up with saves big, double and good at the 24th and 77th minute. Bingham didn’t do it all alone, happily: Zac McGraw and his rippling physique knocked out the aerial threat time and again – one second-half intervention made it look like he has license to chase the ball across the area – and he got one of those long, sturdy (deep breath) legs in the way of one of SKC’s better attempts at a final ball. Mosquera deserves a ton of credit for making Portland’s right side hell to play down or through and I count both Justin Rasmussen and Dario Zuparic as fully present and entirely serviceable...

...and yet keep in mind that only one of these teams cracked the elusive 1.0 xG barrier tonight - and it so painfully and clearly was not Portland. I noted the number as often as AppleTV’s broadcast noted it – it was 0.26 to 0.49 at the half, for Portland and SKC respectively, and still just 0.73 to 0.99 at the 82nd minute – and, chicken-v-egg rebuttals aside, Kansas City didn’t threaten Bingham’s goal all that much. For anyone wanting to feel really depressed, the Timbers xG either deteriorated to 0.5 by the end of the game, or The Mothership measures xG with a different kind of math. Whichever way you cut it, this looked like the same Timbers attack, only with one new, largely invisible face.

Sporting KC's tactics, explained visually and poorly.

To give the visitors very real credit, the stopped Portland about 50 yards further up-field over and over again and throughout the game. If I had to name a genuine anxiety from this game it comes with the way SKC’s midfield three of Roger Espinoza, Remi Walter and Erik Thommy dominated the middle of Providence Park tonight. The only stats the Timbers posted higher numbers on tonight were the defensive ones – i.e., if a team won a game based on duels, tackles and clearances, Portland knocked this one out of the park. Fortunately, fortunate goals count even more and, voila!, that’s how a team pockets three useful points in the Great Western Conference Bank.

To wrap all the above into one thought and something closer to a narrative for the game, Eryk Williamson was arguably the best player on the field for the opening 15 minutes and then he wasn’t. Santiago Moreno came on after Yimmi Chara limped off on a wobbly hammy in the...fuck me, 33rd minute (are you fucking kiddding me?!) and managed the same feat for an even longer period; I’d go so far as to say that Moreno played a solid half hour of next-level shit before the collective weight of SKC choking off everything like wave after wave of “fast zombie” and too many Timbers attackers just giving up under the weight of it...

...yes, I’ve lost track of my metaphors, but what happened with Eryk and Moreno speaks to what happened with tonight’s...I’m calling it encouraging to the extent they got one thing right win. This was the thing about a guy charging up the hill with a heart full of inspiration, etc. Too many attacking players didn’t show up tonight – and that’s how SKC wins on paper what they couldn’t win on the field...well, of course, they'd rather have the three fucking points, but Portland got them instead.

Obviously, and I have to say, fortunately, there is nothing either great or definitive to take from this game. What I have instead is a long train of thoughts that came to me as I watched the game and, sure, thought about things a little. In the order they came to me...

1) The Timbers attacking patterns still suck.
Any time they get the ball wide, they’ve got, at most two players in the box and more often just one. Gio’s plan of attack against a set defense seems to involve setting up players around the area, only to do everything but shoot the ball. Now, that’s not a crazy idea as long as some attempt is made to open lanes for shots from range – and, here, I mean any player besides Marvin Loria. The Timbers seemed wholly and bodily committed to attempting some kind of tiki-taka shit that they've shown no signs of being able to pull for two-plus years now. And the results follow from. Two thoughts related to that:

1a) I saw as little of Evander as you did tonight and, no, that wasn’t ideal. At the same time, keep in mind that the front office brought him in to be The Guy, and that it’ll take time for him to figure that out....which isn’t to say the clock isn’t ticking...

1b) I, like any regular Timbers fan, have seen more and more of Loria over the past four seasons. Nothing in all that time has moved me to think, give this guy more minutes. He has his uses, but, at this point (aka, age 25), he tops out as a player who can take some minutes without making many mistakes. That’s not nothing, but it’s also not the next rung in the ladder.

1c) There was one play that felt like a replay of the second half of 2022 in microcosm. I don’t recall when it happened, but it started with (I think) Moreno running up the left and the Timbers even or with an edge in numbers...and no one seemed to have a clear idea where to go. It’s like they all wanted to be the next guy with the ball at his feet and, instead of looking to make runs that would open up space or provide a different option, they all stared at Moreno waiting for the pass that would make them the next guy with the ball at his feet. This is my theory of the problem with Portland’s attack and I’m sticking to it. Now, here’s why that’s a tragedy.

2) Santiago Moreno came to play this season. So did Eryk Williamson.
They need people to play with, sadly, and they simply didn’t get much of that tonight. Related...

3) Stop Pushing the Button, Gio
Jaroslaw Niezgoda came off in the 62nd minute after, frankly, another nothing day. I don’t see a lot of people defend Niezgoda anymore and, admittedly, it gets harder to do with each passing game, but I do have a thought: we should all know the things he’s not good at by now – e.g., hold-up play – and none better than the people who watching him on a daily basis. So maybe stop pushing that fucking button over and over and expecting a kill-shot. Based on everything I’ve seen, and I've thrashed this horse mercilessly, he’s best moving toward goal with people to riff off of, so maybe do what FC Cincinnati did with Brenner (oh yeah, I went there) where he’d drop off to one side of the attacking third and try to work across underneath. Related to that....

3a) Why not let Nathan Fogaca run up front? Sure, he doesn’t have the size, but neither does Felipe Mora. Much like Maxi Urruti, he’ll run down anything like a greyhound chasing a poorly-painted metal bunny and you can play him into the channels all day long. It’s a different way to play a front runner, but, until either Mora or Dairon Asprilla comes back, that beats the hell out of trying to stuff Niezgoda into someone else’s uniform.

4) This one’s loose, hence the lack of a title, but it felt very true throughout the second half: Portland’s spacing sucked. It looked like they wanted to spread the field, but that only helped SKC choke off the lanes (also, and to their credit, they did a great job of cutting off outlets when they pressed). Between Eryk and Moreno (and Evander, ideally), the Timbers have enough players comfortable operating in tight spaces that I think they’d benefit from doing some of the work of advancing the ball in tighter spaces.

Well, that’s everything, and only gently edited. All in all, the defensive effort gives me solace, but only until I remember that they played SKC. A quick peek into the dark side shows a team that got stymied at midfield and played through in the other direction too often – and it’s the latter that concerns me. Till the next one...