A Casual Fan's Preview, MLS Week 6: Of Bloodlettings and Impostor Syndrome

It's raining Mcmansions.

First, holy shit, I can’t tell you how relieved I am to have numbers – REAL numbers, from xG to records to goal differential – to help shape this discussion. No more building houses on clouds, people, it’s gonna be glorious. If nothing else, I should help tighten up the copy, Ahhhhhhhhhhh-meeeennnnnnnnnnnn!!

At any rate, it’s the same old format – i.e., the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati get longer previews and then smoosh all the rest of it into categories that expand or contract per my personal requirements – only updated for another week. At first glance (and it is that), I see a little intrigue, some faint whiffs of desperation and, frankly, a couple games that I expect to slip from the memory of even the most ardent local fan by the end of Saturday night. I’ll get into all that, but let’s turn to my two personal main events. For what it’s worth, I decided which team to start with by flipping a coin...it’s getting weird out here...

FC Dallas v Portland Timbers
Because we’ve had so little of it, here, in the upper left-hand corner of Oregon, allow me to start with the good news. I just caught word (typing this Tuesday freezing the thought in amber) that Evander, David Ayala and Dairon Asprilla participated in full training on (or perhaps starting) Tuesday, all in the hope of playing Saturday. What? I didn’t say how good the news was...

I kid, I kid. Even if Evander hasn’t set my cockles ablaze and I can’t say I’ve ever seen Ayala play a game that made me feel anything but anxious, I’m happy for the options. Seeing Asprilla in that mix feels better, if only because he’s more of a known quantity; he has arrived/plateaued at a solid second-banana level of contribution – which, sadly, was good enough to make him Portland’s leading scorer last season. Having more of a presence up top, or even just an attacking player able to do more than run(/get swallowed up) by the channel (never to be seen again), certainly can’t hurt an attack that currently clocks exactly one goal per game. Turning, now, to what whoever lines up for Portland will be up against...

First, and for anyone who has ever questioned my reasons for asking the Form Guide to join me in holy matrimony, I’d started mapping out an argument for how “this Portland team could never score on Dallas, a team back-stopped by a steel-plated Alamo.” As it turns out, they’ve allowed a goal in every game of 2023. Not crazy enough that Portland fans should get their hopes up – they’ve allowed six total - but the goals get in their net, even at home.

The Casual Fan's Review, MLS Week 5 + A Stirring 'n' Studly Win for FC Cincinnati

Bet the housh on Houshton...shh...shhh! Listen, listen....

To kick things off with a brief editor’s note, I’ll be dialing back to the Total Coverage next week. Getting eyes on everything doesn’t seem to matter what with the season having a couple weeks under its belt and some early trends taking shape (why, hello the Form Guide!). The next five-year plan presently involves watching the usual – the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati, a real pain/joy, yin-yang experience so far this season – plus chunks of three or four other games, depending how many I can fit in and/or feel motivated to watch.

Related, I outright skipped the following games:

Charlotte FC 1-1 Red Bull New York
San Jose Earthquakes 0-0 Toronto FC
Minnesota United FC 1-1 Vancouver Whitecaps

Part of that was running out of time, the other part follows from seeing these teams as known quantities. To float the loose theories, Minnesota’s plugging along nicely, I’ll watch them when I have to (probably), San Jose looks broadly all right but you just kind of sense the ceiling above, while Charlotte FC pulled out of the nose-dive...that’s it, i.e., they won't go down in a fiery crash, but who knows after that? I haven’t really worked out the two Canadian teams, but I’ve already watched both and expect to see both play footsie with the playoff line all seasons. Again, that’s expect. I don’t do predictions. Not unless I’m feeling saucy...not yet...

Now, for the team/game I’ll never skip, FC Cincinnati and whoever they happen to play on any given MLS Week. [Ed. - At least not unless I opt to take an entire weekend off.] For the record, I have organized the results below in the order of how I read their significance. Most weeks, Cincy’s result is only up top because I decided to lead with them every week, but they earned top spot up here. Better still, they done good!

Nashville SC 0-1 FC Cincinnati: Good Shit’s All Around [Full 90]
The most telling detail that comes to mind about this game is the fact that FC Cincinnati ran down Nashville’s total number of shots in a gradual, grinding way. They had the late-game flurry that Nashville never managed to produce – i.e., the flat line that runs across the latter’s xG chart on The Mothership’s stats page speaks the truth. And right where you see Nashville finally tick upward somewhere in the early-80s, you see Cincy slip further away a couple minutes later. That was the flurry, and the game.

Portland Timbers 0-0 Los Angeles Galaxy: How Hell Works

Marvin did that again? And again? And again? And again?

There was this band in Pullman, Washington way back when called Ignatius, who had a song titled “Waxing Pathetic.” Wish I could find that one right now...

FC Cincinnati played profoundly unwatchable soccer for three solid years. Just head-up-your-ass aimless stuff that made you wonder why they bothered.. I bring that up to explain this tweet:

“My spectator-sports life has come full circle: watching Portland feels like watching FC Cincy used to and vice versa.”

Maybe someone with a gambler’s personality/pathology could look at the last 10 minutes of the Portland Timbers’ exhausting and goal-less home draw against the Los Angeles Galaxy and talk himself into believing they’re due for something better. After 80 minutes of material that, frankly, insulted the concept of nothing, the Timbers finally located the goal and tried to put the ball in it – something long-time fans might recognize as the prime directive of the beautiful game. The increasingly maligned Jaroslaw Niezgoda fired his first shot – and the Timbers’ only shot on goal – at the 89th minute; that’s almost certainly the closest Portland ever came and Niezgoda would slice a header wide just minutes later. Justin Rasmussen fired a good, if tricky look into the stands some time later: and, yeah, that covers close to everything the Timbers did in the attack today.

Nearly everything outside of that fell somewhere between useless and dispiriting. A couple isolated moments aside, Portland hasn’t had an attack worthy of the name all seaosn. I’ll tease out a couple reasons why below – forgive me if I’ve made the same notes before, but also blame the Timbers for doing the same flailing shit over and over again – but I’d call that the second most disturbing thing about what has been a god-awful start to the 2023 season. The first thing: a genuine, thoroughgoing and baffling inability to either hold onto the ball or do something with it – and over stretches of the game that somehow feel longer than the game. I’m pretty sure that’s how Hell works, by the way...

The Galaxy, meanwhile, have some light ruing of their own to do. They never dominated the game, but they did enough to push 50/50 to 60/40 in their favor for most of the first half. They pinged two shots off Portland’s post – one by forward Preston Judd in the first half, and another by the lively Memo Rodriguez on a free-kick (I think) in the second – Gaston Brugman came within a couple fingertips of lobbing David Bingham somewhere in the first five minutes, and they had a couple other good looks besides. The Galaxy moved the ball pretty well, too, or at least they seemed to know where to look for the next pass more often than not (and literally doubled the Timbers on number of passes); if Portland can claim a win on defense, it was forcing Riqui Puig to get on the ball at the base of LA’s attack and thus endeth the list.

The Casual Fan's Preview, MLS Week 5: They Could Have Framed It Better

International "duty" calls.

It’s that special time of week, the Pro-Am festival of grasping after the right talking points and, often, outright making shit up about what to expect from your local team in the MLS Week ahead. (Per Science, an “MLS Week” lasts just six hours (the longer timeline is, predictably, a lie) and weighs just a little less than a small Maine Coon Cat.) Yessirs and Yes’Ms, it’s Preview time.

I liked MLS Week 4, I did, but it didn’t do MLS Week five a ton of favors – by which I mean the match-ups didn’t really come together. Most of the offerings involve increasingly desperate teams getting a little more desperate, several of them in settings and/or against teams that you don’t see throwing them a bone. It’s not all sad trombones; maybe one of those teams who picked up their first win of 2023 last weekend, or even the one or two who hinted they may have a little something raises the noise a couple decibels. We’ll see, we’ll see...

Oh, and to make the entire exercise even less clarifying, just about every team in MLS will be without some of their best players this weekend. While by no means exhaustive, this column gives a fair taste of how many kids ran off to Senior Skip, aka, international call-ups (aka, “international duty,” aka, “ID”). Quick shout to U.S. Soccer, helluva job with the scheduling and platform. Way to bury the product, dipshits. And shouldn’t you be hiring, like, a bunch of people? At any rate.

I’ll touch on every match below – I may even try to stuff a couple together in preposterous (wow, I haven’t used that word in years) conceptual boxes – but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. As for process, I watch a fair/stupid amount of MLS soccer every week and post some notes on it; here’s Week 4’s review (again). After that, it’s just staring at the current standings and the bless’d and holy Form Guide and seeing if that knocks loose something useful. Again, Science.

But, just like every week, I start with longer previews for the two teams I follow. Just to pretend, like one of those parents who pretends they don’t have a favorite kid, I’ll list the previews in the order they kick off this weekend.

MLS Week 4, The Casual Fan's Guide: Hubris & Depth, Plus a Nice Dusting of Disruption

Kinda looks like it's doing The Charleston...

Don’t know about you, but I’d call that a solid weekend. Decent number of goals, some compelling early storylines, a couple teams lifting themselves off the mat, a couple failing to, plus a couple more that leave you feeling those kind of midnight doubts that haunt you in the day. Speaking of the Portland Timbers...

Portland isn’t stumbling alone...and am I thankful for that, but I have extended notes on their gut-wrenching loss to Atlanta United FC in a separate post. The upshot, even with the injuries, they shouldn’t look nearly as dire as they do. Atlanta United generally, and Thiago Almada in particular, backed up the rumors by flaying the Timbers defense like a spatch-cocked chicken (that’s not the word? shit!), though it’s worth noting the teams they’ve beat on their way to the second-best record in MLS.

Moving on, I had Atlanta v Portland in a group of games that I called “On the Edge of Now or Never” in my Week 4 preview post. The basic thought was pretty simple: some teams had to get going before the going gets too far ahead of them. Two teams pulled it off – Club de Foot Montreal and Houston Dynamo FC – while Sporting Kansas City, like, the Timbers, did not.

The results by Montreal and Houston count as disruptors in this early season – i.e., scores that feel like snagging your sock in the carpet – but those weren’t the only kind. I framed another set of games around teams who had perfect records after the first two weeks, only to lose in MLS Week 3. They had better or worse shots at proving they still had the proverbial "it," but here’s the thing: only one of those teams – the New England Revolution – backed up their early start. The rest failed (Inter Miami CF and, especially Orlando City SC) or fell short (Seattle Sounders...huh...skipped that one), and what’s that but more disruption?

All in all, call it a week that poured some sugar in the ol’ gas tank. Nothing crazy, but it kept things lively. Seattle v Los Angeles FC aside (why? Pffft...), I touch on every game below – and that brings me to one more thing that churned my butter (a bad thing, fwiw). I was promised (you promised!) access to full-game replays by the Apple TV package and, near as I can tell, the platform left me hanging on a couple games I would really liked to have seen more of. Given that I’m fully subscribed – and to the point where I still haven’t got around to asking them to refund my original payment – I’m not sure what the hell’s going on, I only know I don’t like it. I don’t like it enough that I could very well make a phone call, maybe even ask to speak to a manager...that’s right. I’m Karen-pissed.

Atlanta United FC 5-1 Portland Timbers: A Festival of Waiting and Staring

Every Timber, and all Timbers.

Let’s start here:

“I mean, I don’t want to overplay the possibility Portland will be ‘the next Charlotte,’ but I don’t want to ignore it either.”

I pulled that from my MLS Week 4 preview and, while I don’t tell the future often, I would have won the lottery with a call that precise in 90% of your state lotteries. If soccer has a spin on getting kicked in the balls hard and true, it’s giving up anything north of four goals. And yet I want to pause here to present a couple arguments...hold on, before I get on the upcoming roll, the Portland Timbers got rolled like...16 drunks (that’s starters plus five subs) tonight in and by Atlanta tonight, losing 1-5 to a team that’s starting to look somewhere between plausible and serious. And, yes, as confirmed by the stats, the Timbers could have lost by a couple more on a worse day.

Back to the arguments...

I don’t blame the defense for this one. It was at least three-times removed from perfect – see the collective bumble that let Atlanta’s Caleb Wiley slip through for a long-range tap-in for their first, or the field-wide absence of anything helpful to stop Giorgos Giakoumakis from breaking his duck, and all over Portland’s defense (....and where the hell does “breaking his duck” come from and why such a dirty phrase?). Giakoumakis' goal put the game to 1-3 against Portland, but things looked lost the second Thiago Almada – from Atlanta, obviously, because how could Portland have an MVP in a 1-5 loss? – thumped in a Georgia peach of a free-kick from....where do you reckon, Zeke? 28 yards? 30? I’m trying to cut back on linking in posts. Not just on the suspicion that no one hits any of the links, but because you’re all adults and you know how to find what you like...but Almada’s free kick is worth linking to, seriously.

After that, sure, you can fault Larrys Mabiala for getting bumped off the play by a player (Almada) about two-thirds his side and I’m just as sure someone out there has things to say about how Luiz Araujo got around Justin Rasmussen, but those were the fifth and fourth goals of the game, respectively (I listed those two in order of egregiousness), and, as noted above, if there’s a team “this fucker was over once Atlanta scored three” club, I hereby sign on as Treasurer.

The Weakly, MLS Week 4 Preview: Steadily Improving...With Exceptions

Stupid, and yet in touch with the universe.

Whether by a level of planning I never thought them capable of, simple match-fixing, or an act of God, the results from MLS Week 3 teed up more good, intrigue-laced games than duds for MLS Week 4. Some teams need to get out of the hole before they dig themselves too deep, others need to shake off some rust before the gears stop working for a good long while, an at least one looks to defy rules as fundamental as gravity (i.e., the expansion blues) for another week. I won’t pretend there aren’t a couple turds in the ol’ punchbowl, but if you wrote all the games on a large piece of paper, sprinkled chicken feed all over it, and set a rooster loose on it somewhere between...I believe it’s ten to and ten after midnight under a full moon, that rooster’s gonna do you a solid.

Now, if you just asked that same roster what he thought about the Portland Timbers’ and FC Cincinnati’s Week 4 opposition, he might say something like this....

Atlanta United FC v Portland Timbers
I think we’re all in agreement that Charlotte FC sucks – I’ve seen a couple peg them as league-worst - and that makes it tempting to yank Atlanta’s Week 3 win out of sample. And yet, if I just described a team as largely ineffectual and given to catastrophic breakdowns, would it be so unnatural for your mind to wander to the Timbers? To put that another way, Atlanta has yet to meet a league power over its three week season and nothing about hosting Portland this Saturday changes that.

On the one hand, the Timbers have a ward’s worth of injuries to point to, but who disagrees that the uneasiness runs deeper? Had 2022 ended with anything brighter than a wet, absent-minded fart, the ol’ familiar March slump might look different, but, to turn this whole thing into a dog chasing its tail, I’d argue that things will not get better until Portland’s physios get a couple guys out of the ward - and, for the record, there's a theory floating around twitter that Portland's phyisos are the last people who will fix the problem. On the (a?) plus side, Dairon Asprilla and David Ayala have returned to training, but they won’t be their whole, best selves for some weeks (and what does that mean for Ayala, really?)...and, I literally just sputter from there. This has “gut it out, and get what you can” written all over it for Portland. As for what they’re up against...

The Weakly, MLS Week...3 (Right?) Review: March or August...Does It Matter?

So...goes he become dicky?

First: if you came here looking for a comprehensive review of Major League Soccer’s 3rd week of action, hit this link (which goes to Matt Doyle’s weekly self-flagellation), listen to ExtraTime Radio, or your favorite local soccer podcast, etc. etc.

Think of this as a review for the casual fan – i.e., people who want to a big-picture sense of which teams look good versus the teams they can see and breathe a sigh of relief when they come to play their local team. In other words, expect the analysis to top out at “they looked good for the win” and “this player seems to be working out” instead of arcane mathematical formulas, charts that look like five-pointed explosions, or chatter about false 9s, inverted fullbacks, and xDAWG...which sounds like something that comes after “bro” sometime around 2:00 a.m.

I say that less to disparage that level of analysis (even as I despair of making sense of those 5-pointed explosions...and don’t even think of trying to explain them because LA LA LA LA LA!) than to more or less admit that I don’t want to think that hard about the game. Knowing the specific ways your team uses its right back and in what formation is neat, sure, but it’s decidedly less significant than the Greatest Question of All: Is It Working? I put aside my “Nate the Great” fantasies a couple decades ago.

Now, let’s kick around MLS Week 3...and I’m going to pull something from Doyle’s column for framing:

“Matchday 3 is in the books, and it gave us all a wonderful reminder of what a grind early-season MLS typically is. Year after year this is the lowest-scoring point of the season because teams just don’t have enough reps to be sharp with the ball – they’re more likely to disorganize themselves than their opponents up until about Matchday 6 or so.”

Confident as I am that he crunched the numbers, I’m looking at Week 3’s four draws and four 1-0 wins and thinking it doesn’t look so different than what we’ll all see come late summer/early fall. There’s an inverse to that argument – specifically, the idea that, as the season (very seriously) wears on, defenses get better, struggling teams invent new and shittier ways to suck the fun out of games, and so on. Maybe I’m wrong, but I doubt that argument's a hard to sell to anyone who endured the final months of the 2022 regular season.

FC Cincinnati 1- 0 Seattle Sounders: Smooth Like Victor...

Victor Mature, in a less than mature moment...

I can’t tell you how much hearing the broadcast booth dip into the cliche about tonight’s game being “kind of like a playoff game” got under my skin...

...and yet the sons o’ bitches got it more right than wrong. The game labored under the pacing of a slow-burn drama, but FC Cincinnati’s 1-0 home win over the (once) red-hot Seattle Sounders (I’ve earned that; Portland Timbers fan) came to life shortly after Seattle decided to take chances. To that point, yep, both teams really did play it in the risk-averse fashion of a playoff game – something I find utterly bizarre given how little any given game counts in the MLS regular season. I get playing for the win, but I also get swinging for the fences when points matter as little as they do right now, aka, buckle up for 20 weeks’ worth of loose claims about this result or that one “proving [YOUR TEAM] really belongs this season.” Yessir, “statement win” articles are already dropping.

As noted/argued in my game thread on this one, a watchable soccer game relies on one team sincerely believing it’s the better on as a starting premise. If Seattle felt that tonight, they didn’t show it, at least not at the beginning. To harp on a theme I expect I’ll be playing all season long, Seattle pumped up their aura with two season-opening wins, but...had you described the setting and opposition of each – i.e., the Colorado Rapids and Real Salt Lake, both in Seattle – I doubt you’d have to make a long case for them getting all six points. As implied at the top of the game thread, I saw Cincinnati away as Seattle’s first real challenge of 2023.

Before going any further, I want to make one thing clear: I will not be indulging in any “your team really belongs” narratives until sometime after the 20th week in the season. Going the other way, Cincy put together an impressive evening, maybe even a complete one. Call it a mature performance, the kind of wily veteran shit you see in a team that feels a breeze at its back. That’s not always entertaining to watch – won’t lie, I was bored for fair stretches of this one – but a well-managed game provides comforts and satisfactions of its own.

Portland Timbers 1-2 St. Louis CITY FC: A Complicated Affair, with My Compliments to the Villains

Bro. Little help?

At this point in the season, nothing kicks you in the balls/punches you in the tits quite like the rare moments when the Portland Timbers look like a professional soccer team. By my math, that has happened exactly three times during the 2023 season – the last 25+ minutes against Los Angeles FC and, perhaps more tellingly, the first five minutes of the (seriously) home games against Sporting Kansas City – who, thank gods, suck as bad as they do – and, tonight, St. Louis CITY FC, aka, the team that yells at you!!!

Unlike that one, lonely win at SKC, St. Louis hammered on the Timbers’s fingers until they slipped off the cliff’s edge and that’s the how Portland fell to a 1-2 loss at Providence Park tonight. Gods’ honest truth, St. Louis' second goal slighted the Timbers’ honor slightly less than their first. Set pieces have been Portland’s Achilles heel for almost as long as Achilles sulked in his tent, but the fact not one single Timber tracked Jared Stroud’s late run on the equalizer...well, what is that but bad news? And when you suck at set pieces the way the Timbers do, the cost of allowing any other kind of mistake...well, what can that do but grow and grow until it chokes you like kudzu?

Details aside, the singularly most troublesome thing about the Timbers’ season so far is their collective and apparent inability to control a game in any way whatsoever. They can have moments, they can flash some magic here and there (don’t quote me on that), but I can’t remember the last time I felt like the Timbers had a real handle on any game they’ve played.

And yet, if you’re like me, you still hear the siren’s song, i.e., that soothing sense of calm that seeps into your senses when you see a promising 20 minutes last week, or a promising 20 minutes this week. It’s a seductive trance, of course...and I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, especially given the dreary reality of Timbers soccer right now, but, the real story of the 2023 season so far tracks closer to something I tweeted during in my game thread:

“It’s slipping away bit by bit but Portland’s doing all right so far, even if I miss and/or want to see more of the caffeinated [sic] beginning.”

The Weakly, MLS Week 3 Preview: Observations and Expectations on a Slow Bus to an Expanded Station

My money's on Pennsylvania...

Seems like it was only yesterday since I wrapped up MLS Week 2, and yet here comes MLS Week 3, barreling toward the 2023 post-season with the speed and urgency of a Greyhound milk-run puttering from Maine to Cincinnati, Ohio (which I do not recommend, btw). A couple early narratives have taken shape – and I’ve laced those into the notes on Week 3’s games below – but, as we all know, there’s plenty of road ahead and they added a new wing to Cincinnati’s bus station. [NOTE: This is not accurate, please do not rely upon. So far as I know, Cincy built its Greyhound station in the 1950s and promptly forgot it existed.] In case it's not clear, all the above is a tortured analogy for the long regular season and expanded playoffs...

I cobbled together the observations below based on what I saw last weekend (my notes on that), some glassy-eyed staring at the soon-to-be invaluable Form Guide, and some stray stuff I’ve picked up, mostly from half-reading Sam Jones’ Daily Kickoff newsletter...whoa, just realized I haven’t so much as glanced at a Matt Doyle column since First Kick...

To be clear, I don’t really do predictions. It’s more kicking around expectations and pulling for results that amuse, baffle and, on the best of days, titillate. Anyhoo, there’s plenty below, so I’ll shut up and get to it. Starting with the two teams followed in this space, and in the order they’ll play on Saturday.

FC Cincinnati v Seattle Sounders
If someone told me to kick a dent into Seattle’s reputation, I’d try the three following arguments:

1) They’ve played both games at home.

2) One of the teams they hosted, the Colorado Rapids, has a history of being their punching bag (18-7-2 all-time) and Colorado’s Lalas Abubakar played part in two of those four goals. [Ed. - Fun fact: the Sounders actually have a losing historical record against Real Salt Lake at 11-12-5.]

3) Neither Colorado nor RSL has what FC Cincinnati has in the attack...when it’s rolling.

A lot of that boils down to another way of asking, how optimistic do you feel about Cincinnati in 2023?

MLS Weakly, Week 2 Review: At Least 1/3 Interesting

Department of Curt Explanations

The editorial note first: I’ve decided to separate the weekly review and weekly preview posts. It turns out posting content in the literally dead middle of relevant events wasn’t a great idea. Who knew?

I can’t call MLS Week 2 important, but it did entertain here and there. Sadly, it failed to do so in the games starring the two teams nearest and dearest to my heart, the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati. I watched all...or enough of those games and wrote extended, sometimes speculative notes about each game. While both played on the road, and neither lived up to their own, or even their fans' expectations (then again, in Portland’s case....), Cincy had the better afternoon and by a fair stretch. Coulda won that one...the Timbers, meanwhile, were fortunate to salvage some dignity after a first half to forget. At any rate, if you’re interested in those extended, speculative notes hit the links below.

Orlando City SC 0-0 FC Cincinnati
Los Angeles FC 3-2 Portland Timbers

To get back to the plot, Week 2 had some clunkers. While I’m not going to ignore those games entirely, I am going to bury them at the bottom of the post and dismiss them with a curt explanation of why I didn’t care about that game and/or your local team. As for the rest, I’ve adopted a new model for these reviews:

I’ll take deeper dives into a total of four games every week, two because the teams involved play either Portland or Cincinnati the following week(end), and two more because they seem important/interesting/amusing.

After that, I’ll review highlights and box scores for any game that strikes me as worth the time – three this week, for the record – and close by spitting on the dregs...oops, shit. Already covered that. Right, on to the big picture.

It’s Week 2, obviously, so, no, none of these results actually matter. Between history and the...things I’ve seen, I expect to see just one of the two teams now topping each conference in the same place by season’s end (Seattle), but I’m also an easy-going kind of guy who’s here for the thrillz, so what can I say but surprise me? Going the other way, I’m not unconvinced that we’ll see, at most, a team or two swap out of the top half of the Eastern Conference as now constituted – i.e., the “Playoff Half” – by the time the 2023 playoffs roll around. The West just looks more fluid to me right now...but can I seriously say that I can’t picture all five of the teams now below the line (for reference, Sporting Kansas City, the Colorado Rapids, the Vancouver Whitecaps, the Los Angeles Galaxy and Houston Dynamo FC) ending in the same mire? No. No, I cannot.

Orlando City SC 0-0 FC Cincinnati: More Dutiful Than Beautiful

You can move a lot without going anywhere...

In last week’s Review/Preview, I called Orlando Ciy SC v FC Cincinnati a “Big Early Test.” The hosts failed the test harder than the visitors in yesterday’s 0-0 loss, but Cincinnati doesn’t have a lot to cheer either.

Damn that stray glance I caught while bouncing between games last night, because I knew the final score going in. I still watched every damn minute...well, a lot minutes (a solid 85%) of this game just now and don’t entirely regret the experience. If nothing else, Cincy tidied up the mess in midfield after the opener. Junior Moreno looked steady and I liked the way he (mostly) set up to allow Obinna Nwobodo to prowl further up-field – and to pretty decent effect. Nwobodo set up what may have been the best shot of the game - i.e., the one a happily more-visible Brandon Vazquez chipped against the crossbar – and that speaks to a larger truth, i.e., if either team was going to score yesterday, it would have been Cincinnati.

Turning to the flip-side of that thought, Orlando simply does not generate much offense – or at least haven’t over their first two games of 2023. They’ve fired 13 shots total so far (see this and see that) and with just two on frame (and was one of them the penalty that won it against Red Bull New York?). Having sat through my first full(ish) 90 with them, yeah, can confirm it's a lot of aimless shit, moving in and about the top of the attacking third and to no notable affect. Honestly, you have to assume their fans are bored shitless so far.

I heard talk from the broadcast booth about Orlando “heavily-rotating” its squad ahead of Tuesday’s CCL game against Mexico’s Tigres UANL, but Orlando still squeezed 45-65 minutes out of several clear starters - e.g., Mauricio Pereyra, Robin Jansson, Facundo Torres and Ercan Kara – though let the record note the rumblings from the broadcast booth about looking for options beyond Kara to give the attack some kind of juice.

So, that’s who and what Cincinnati was up against. And, sure and to their credit, they did all right with it. The team found a minimum of two great looks for Luciano Acosta, Brenner fired at least one shot in anger, and Vazquez finally made his 2023 debut, making smart passes – if I recall right, he dimed the big, fat diagonal that teed up Acosta’s better chance - spreading the field with hard, effective running and getting into decent-to-good places in the box. Unfortunately, Orlando’s Pedro Gallese saved all of those, most of them comfortably. To sum Cincinnati’s evening into one pithy phrase...it was fine.

Los Angeles FC 3-2 Portland Timbers: Taking the Good from the Present

The top rock on the left fell off around the 65th.

Just when you’d given up, amirite? Ah, what could have been had the Portland Timbers played the entire game the way they played the final 30 minutes...

One thing I know for sure: I didn’t see Evander’s goal coming until Cristian Paredes’ dummy got the words, “holy shit,” halfway out of my mouth. Everything Portland did to that point rattled around the bad bandwidth of anxious and useless – and to the point that any sane person would have taken inflated odds against them scoring a second. And yet they did, with a goal that mirrored the scramble that teed up Los Angeles FC’s opener. That gave the game a nice sort of symmetry, even if on a see-saw that had only begun to tilt toward balance.

Two big questions hang over the Timbers’ 2-3 loss away to LAFC.

First, did you expect anything but a loss? Just as a thought exercise, put away all the specific complaints from today, forget the...concerning first half: quiet your mind and ask yourself, would you have picked the Timbers team you saw down the stretch in 2022 to go into the tougher half of Los Angeles in the second game of the next season (aka, March) and win that game? Sub-question: what do you think your answer would be if I told you that Dairon Asprilla, Sebastian Blanco, Felipe Mora and (why not?) Yimmi Chara would not be available before the game?

Admit it. You would have thought for, at most, a second before muttering, “yeah, they’re fucked.”

That’s for anyone who needs a pick-me-up after The Half That Shall Not Be Named.

The second question seems bigger to me – and I pose it without having a clear answer.

How much did the triple substitution at the 59th minute change the game? To refresh your memory (and you’re not alone), the Timbers replaced Santiago Moreno, Marvin Loria and Justin Rasmussen with Larrys Mabiala, Cristhian Paredes, and Claudio Bravo, respectively. Some gnashing of teeth flared up in my wee corner of twitter – the grounds was Portland “going defensive,” which isn’t a crazy thought – but the changes made decent sense in context – i.e., Gio traded a a little more beef in defense (aka, Mabiala) for a player whose touch appeared afflicted by nerves (aka, Moreno), a solid shuttler (aka, Paredes) for a stymied soloist (aka, Loria), and he almost unquestionably upgraded the left back position and threw more attacking juice into the mix when he replaced Rasmussen with Bravo.

MLS Week 1 Weekly, The Weakliest Weekly of the Season

And it'll happen again about as often.

Major League Soccer’ 2023 season kicked off Saturday with a weather-delay and an outright cancellation – so, nothing on either LA team – but, more to the point, it came with a couple upsets, one of the worst individual performances I’ve seen in years [Ed. – after reviewing some tape, make that two], and a healthy slice of late goals. Better, one of the upsets had the other two things. Which to say, the opening week hit at least one trifecta.

This post marches through nearly all the games - some more in depth than others – with...fairly quick and general notes about MLS Week. And I’ll cap off the post with “what does it all mean” for the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati. (Anyone interested in deeper dives into either of those can dive into Portland’s C&C Match Report and/or Cincinnati’s CC& Match Report), but I really do want these posts to be about everyone else in the league Teams great, and the Chicago Fire FC. Hey...pulling for you guys.

As always, the links under each score will take you to The Motherships recap screens, which, to give them the odd “well done,” I’ve always found helpful. Wait! Are they doing the Form Guide this year?! Yep! How ‘bout that...still cuts off at 33 games. Right, let’s kick things off with..

The Conifers & Citrus Official Game of the Week
Inter Miami CF 2-0 Club de Foot Montreal
So...why this game? Put it this way: I went in with a sneaking suspicion and walked away feeling like I made the right call. Full disclosure: I watched at least three quarters of it and paid about the same amount of attention. About the game, first and foremost, Miami was better than good for that result. Neither goal was elegant – Serhii Kryvstov nudged in the first with his lap and it took substitute Shanyder Borgelin two cracks from six yards out to get the ball over the line, and even only came after Ariel Lassiter’s first shot pinged off the post straight to Borgelin’s feet – but Miami managed play in a way that somehow fails to show in the numbers. Yeah, my lying eyes call bullshit on the 78.7% passing accuracy number because Miami’s players seemed to find good open options everywhere they looked. At times, particularly in the first half, Montreal couldn’t escape their own half: Miami’s Jean Mota and Gregore hung a big ol’ “Thou Shalt Not Pass” across the middle of the field and, with help from Rodolfo Pizzaro, they directed traffic back to Montreal’s goal over and over again. Maybe all the misses came with penultimate and final passes that failed to connect because, despite the clinic in the midfield, Miami neither connected with the forwards – yes, it was Josef Martinez’s debut, and he lasted about two/thirds of the game – nor created a ton of chances...a statement that is, yes, belied by a respectable haul of 18 shots, 7 on goal. My lying fucking eyes.