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| It'd be better if it was better. |
I have so many thoughts.
One, would I take Vanni Sartini as a coach just because I like him? For all his shortcomings, yes. Yes, I would.
Second, while there’s absolutely no question that the better team won...did the Vancouver Whitecaps actually blow off your doors and/or socks? On the one hand, absolutely, they generated literal multiples of more offense and forced...holy shit, eight saves from one of the Portland Timbers’ few bright spots tonight, Aljaz Ivacic. On the other, the ‘Caps fired a (reported) total of 13 shots. Even with a disturbing number of those going on goal – and Ivacic’s numbers 100% back this up – I’d argue that tonight made a decent argument that Vancouver’s actual level falls closer to what they’d done over the first five games of the season (when they went 0-2-3) than what they did in the 6th (the shellacking of Montreal...who got drubbed again tonight, btw). Pursuant thereto...
Second Point, First Addendum: what does the above statement say about the state of the Timbers?
Second Point, Second Addendum: what does that say about tonight’s result?
With the scaffolding now built, let’s dig into all of the above.
To circle back to the facts, the Portland Timbers lost tonight, 0-1 at BC Place in Vancouver to the Whitecaps. If asked to answer the question, how did it go, I’d point to the literal two fucking shots Portland fired tonight. And zero of those went on goal, for those counting at home. I know I can’t make a plausible argument for any Timbers fan to feel good – particularly anyone who saw that wet, steaming pile of futility – and yet I’m going to try.
To be 1,000% clear, I’m not doing this for morale, or out of some fan-brain need to find the good in a fairly large pile of bad (for what it’s worth, I’m a big fan of corn). At the same time, I’ve made a conscious decision to accept all of what we’re all enduring – together, mind you, and I can’t thank people enough – as a work in progress. In a better world, said work is building a better future. In a bad one...well, what is fan-brain but delusion?
As for the game, the Timbers ran two meters behind from the beginning. Vancouver forced a great save out Ivacic somewhere around the fourth minute and a good one just two minutes later. Even if the ‘Caps didn’t dominate the first half, they had it in them to coordinate extended periods of pressure. They rarely cracked Portland open, but they’d find angles to create half-chances and, when things got heavy, they’d get two, or even three consecutive corner kicks (I see the official count ended at 12 corners...nah) and that happened here and there throughout the game. Portland never came close to matching it (obviously), but...what does all that pressure mean if it lacks precision? Full disclosure, I just pulled back an entire sentence/thought process about it lacking direction, which makes this feel like a good time for an interlude on the Whitecaps...
They’re a stranger team than, I believe, most people appreciate – and I argue that without any claim to deep knowledge about them. They have a legit playmaker in Julian Gressel – almost certainly the Man of the Match for both teams tonight (hold that thought*) – and...it’s mostly decent from there. Look, I’ve lost track of the number of years I’ve heard pundits (in-house MLS people, mostly) call Vancouver “almost there” over the past...going with three seasons. For all that, and Gressel aside, I saw flashes from the ‘Caps’ other attacking players tonight – e.g., Simon Becher showed the same combination of strength and mobility at forward that I saw last week and Ali Ahmed really does go at defenses the way the broadcast booth said he did – and, sure, they won the game, but they won it on a kind of goal that doesn’t easily replicate. (Also, and again, fuck VAR; I miss the holy shit out of spontaneaous goal celebrations.) As much as Vancouver deserved to win, it still felt like a function of how so, so very little the Timbers tested them in the other direction. And, for the record, I’m only going to honor them with their new name, the Tmibers, when they earn it.
To close the thought on Vancouver, I only either worry or think about them through the lens of whether or not they’re better than, not so much what the Timbers are, but the team they may become. And here’s where I dig into the whole “work in progress” thing started above. First...
The Defense Hasn’t Been Bad
Yes, I suffered through the loss at Atlanta just like you – and thank gods I don’t allow such things to get seared into my brain. Outside of that...and maybe the home loss to St. Louis CITY FC, I’d rank the defense somewhere between credible and good. Portland has played and, in fairness, lost to a few of the better attacking teams in MLS – e.g., Los Angeles FC, Atlanta (who, fwiw, would still be in the upper echelons of the league without the five they dropped on Portland), and that same St. Louis team – but they’ve been good against most other teams. And I’d call the defense pretty good tonight. Throw Ivacic into that same pot and you (arguably) have a team that can stay in matches with....let’s call them the non-elite teams of MLS. Very much related, I don’t think MLS has a lot of elite teams. By design and possibly to our collective detriment? For me, yeah. Still, that absence of elite teams and the wide, open expanses of the MLS post-season gives teams a lot of room for error and ample time to get things right. Having a good (enough) defense means a team has a chance...at least so long as they give themselves one.
And now the rest of it...
One, would I take Vanni Sartini as a coach just because I like him? For all his shortcomings, yes. Yes, I would.
Second, while there’s absolutely no question that the better team won...did the Vancouver Whitecaps actually blow off your doors and/or socks? On the one hand, absolutely, they generated literal multiples of more offense and forced...holy shit, eight saves from one of the Portland Timbers’ few bright spots tonight, Aljaz Ivacic. On the other, the ‘Caps fired a (reported) total of 13 shots. Even with a disturbing number of those going on goal – and Ivacic’s numbers 100% back this up – I’d argue that tonight made a decent argument that Vancouver’s actual level falls closer to what they’d done over the first five games of the season (when they went 0-2-3) than what they did in the 6th (the shellacking of Montreal...who got drubbed again tonight, btw). Pursuant thereto...
Second Point, First Addendum: what does the above statement say about the state of the Timbers?
Second Point, Second Addendum: what does that say about tonight’s result?
With the scaffolding now built, let’s dig into all of the above.
To circle back to the facts, the Portland Timbers lost tonight, 0-1 at BC Place in Vancouver to the Whitecaps. If asked to answer the question, how did it go, I’d point to the literal two fucking shots Portland fired tonight. And zero of those went on goal, for those counting at home. I know I can’t make a plausible argument for any Timbers fan to feel good – particularly anyone who saw that wet, steaming pile of futility – and yet I’m going to try.
To be 1,000% clear, I’m not doing this for morale, or out of some fan-brain need to find the good in a fairly large pile of bad (for what it’s worth, I’m a big fan of corn). At the same time, I’ve made a conscious decision to accept all of what we’re all enduring – together, mind you, and I can’t thank people enough – as a work in progress. In a better world, said work is building a better future. In a bad one...well, what is fan-brain but delusion?
As for the game, the Timbers ran two meters behind from the beginning. Vancouver forced a great save out Ivacic somewhere around the fourth minute and a good one just two minutes later. Even if the ‘Caps didn’t dominate the first half, they had it in them to coordinate extended periods of pressure. They rarely cracked Portland open, but they’d find angles to create half-chances and, when things got heavy, they’d get two, or even three consecutive corner kicks (I see the official count ended at 12 corners...nah) and that happened here and there throughout the game. Portland never came close to matching it (obviously), but...what does all that pressure mean if it lacks precision? Full disclosure, I just pulled back an entire sentence/thought process about it lacking direction, which makes this feel like a good time for an interlude on the Whitecaps...
They’re a stranger team than, I believe, most people appreciate – and I argue that without any claim to deep knowledge about them. They have a legit playmaker in Julian Gressel – almost certainly the Man of the Match for both teams tonight (hold that thought*) – and...it’s mostly decent from there. Look, I’ve lost track of the number of years I’ve heard pundits (in-house MLS people, mostly) call Vancouver “almost there” over the past...going with three seasons. For all that, and Gressel aside, I saw flashes from the ‘Caps’ other attacking players tonight – e.g., Simon Becher showed the same combination of strength and mobility at forward that I saw last week and Ali Ahmed really does go at defenses the way the broadcast booth said he did – and, sure, they won the game, but they won it on a kind of goal that doesn’t easily replicate. (Also, and again, fuck VAR; I miss the holy shit out of spontaneaous goal celebrations.) As much as Vancouver deserved to win, it still felt like a function of how so, so very little the Timbers tested them in the other direction. And, for the record, I’m only going to honor them with their new name, the Tmibers, when they earn it.
To close the thought on Vancouver, I only either worry or think about them through the lens of whether or not they’re better than, not so much what the Timbers are, but the team they may become. And here’s where I dig into the whole “work in progress” thing started above. First...
The Defense Hasn’t Been Bad
Yes, I suffered through the loss at Atlanta just like you – and thank gods I don’t allow such things to get seared into my brain. Outside of that...and maybe the home loss to St. Louis CITY FC, I’d rank the defense somewhere between credible and good. Portland has played and, in fairness, lost to a few of the better attacking teams in MLS – e.g., Los Angeles FC, Atlanta (who, fwiw, would still be in the upper echelons of the league without the five they dropped on Portland), and that same St. Louis team – but they’ve been good against most other teams. And I’d call the defense pretty good tonight. Throw Ivacic into that same pot and you (arguably) have a team that can stay in matches with....let’s call them the non-elite teams of MLS. Very much related, I don’t think MLS has a lot of elite teams. By design and possibly to our collective detriment? For me, yeah. Still, that absence of elite teams and the wide, open expanses of the MLS post-season gives teams a lot of room for error and ample time to get things right. Having a good (enough) defense means a team has a chance...at least so long as they give themselves one.
And now the rest of it...
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| They look so mellow. Weird.... |
The Negative
I’m still not 100% sure as to how the Timbers’ starting line-up actually, y’know, lined up, but my general impression was that Tega Ikoba stayed highest, with Juan David Mosquera as a close second, both a guiding the attack and *as Portland’s candidate for Man of the Match – if for as long as that lasted. I think most other Timbers – Dairon Asprilla, Santiago Moreno and Diego Gutierrez – played deeper and, yes, I do think that worked as well as Portland sitting on 0.00 xG for most of the game says it did. Wait, it gets worse.
The words to describe what Timbers do and so, so very much fail to do when they go forward still has not taken its full and perfect shape in my brain – and, gods above, let it be cured before the words come to me. To back up a step, there are times when I think Portland doesn’t really look so different in the attack than other teams and this is the 100th case of me being hyper-critical about things I can’t control (I love the Serenity Prayer more than I live it), so it was helpful to watch Whitecaps players provide real-time confirmation that the Timbers are, in fact, a self-destructively static and clueless team going forward. When a Vancouver player got on the ball – and I mean this in most cases, not all of them – the players around them started to shift in order to give them options, e.g., if a fullback had it, a defensive midfielder would move toward him, while, say, the winger would go forward. Presented with the same scenario...I don’t even know and that’s what’s making this season so maddening. I can’t count the number of times I saw a Timber player get the ball in a good amount of space only to have everyone around him hold the same position or, somehow worse, trot vaguely in some direction but without any plan to beg questions of the defender minding him or the defense as a whole.
And that’s the grand takeaway I saw as I bounced around twitter during the game (and, again, thanks!). No one on the team seems to know what to do when any given player gets on the ball. To be clear, I’m completely fucking serious about this. Not one fucking idea. It’s literally astonishing.
The Positives, Because I Like Ending on a High Note
First and foremost, these are the kind of points a team shouldn’t be surprised to drop. In the grand scheme of keeping ahead of the competition, the only points you really sweat are the ones you shouldn’t – and that’s a scale that never, ever stops sliding. And, yes, Portland’s on the wrong side of it. No, seriously, getting to the positives now...
Mosquera counts as a good piece – and to the extent that I dream of what he can do when he gets better players around him. Also, and as much as I questioned how far he had to drop to find it, I liked seeing Evander go as far back as he had to in order to get on the ball, if only because he needs to find his places within whatever system the Timbers have right now. It’s a lot of mess from there, but I guess this amounts to my argument that this team can’t move forward until it becomes some new player’s team. That’s a long way of saying I don’t think Evander has the juice, either on a performance level or in the locker room, to call the shots. And yet, I’m starting to see the outline of a concept.
It will always and forever be hard to trace the precise impact of a substitution – and that goes double for when the game-states shift (hey...throwback concept) - but Franck Boli looked like a good, if...let’s call it a-traditional addition to the mix described above. If I had to give a reason as to why I feel okay about taking a wait-and-see approach to all this, I’d answer that Mosquera, Evander and Boli are all new players. And then I’d back that up by reminding people that the Timbers haven’t been all that bad on defense so far this season. Except against Atlanta.
I won’t pretend this was a good night for Portland. Hell, I’ve got a laundry list of shortcomings and near-failures that I expect I’ll be fleshing out in the weeks ahead – e.g., is it just me, or did your eyes roll out of the back of your head when you saw anyone refer to David Ayala as a remotely important player on Portland’s roster? – but I’d go so far as to call myself confident that they Timbers will improve. Moreover, and related to a conversation started above, I count about a half dozen teams in the Western Conference that, right now, feel like good bets to race the Timbers to the cellar. Sad as that sounds – don’t get me wrong, this is like watching a three-legged race where everyone got animal tranquilizers shot in their asses as the starting whistle blew – it also gives the Timbers time to get their shit straightened out. Insofar as they can.
There are no guarantees, especially not with the rash of health scares Portland has lived with since...I’m going with 2020 – but I am, frankly, okay with this being a rebuild and/or taking some time. Regardless of whether one or both has been a great signing, The Organization (that so, so many of us hate) has shown a willingness to spend money. Even if that’s not keeping the team perfectly and ideally competitive...isn’t it trying?
I’m still not 100% sure as to how the Timbers’ starting line-up actually, y’know, lined up, but my general impression was that Tega Ikoba stayed highest, with Juan David Mosquera as a close second, both a guiding the attack and *as Portland’s candidate for Man of the Match – if for as long as that lasted. I think most other Timbers – Dairon Asprilla, Santiago Moreno and Diego Gutierrez – played deeper and, yes, I do think that worked as well as Portland sitting on 0.00 xG for most of the game says it did. Wait, it gets worse.
The words to describe what Timbers do and so, so very much fail to do when they go forward still has not taken its full and perfect shape in my brain – and, gods above, let it be cured before the words come to me. To back up a step, there are times when I think Portland doesn’t really look so different in the attack than other teams and this is the 100th case of me being hyper-critical about things I can’t control (I love the Serenity Prayer more than I live it), so it was helpful to watch Whitecaps players provide real-time confirmation that the Timbers are, in fact, a self-destructively static and clueless team going forward. When a Vancouver player got on the ball – and I mean this in most cases, not all of them – the players around them started to shift in order to give them options, e.g., if a fullback had it, a defensive midfielder would move toward him, while, say, the winger would go forward. Presented with the same scenario...I don’t even know and that’s what’s making this season so maddening. I can’t count the number of times I saw a Timber player get the ball in a good amount of space only to have everyone around him hold the same position or, somehow worse, trot vaguely in some direction but without any plan to beg questions of the defender minding him or the defense as a whole.
And that’s the grand takeaway I saw as I bounced around twitter during the game (and, again, thanks!). No one on the team seems to know what to do when any given player gets on the ball. To be clear, I’m completely fucking serious about this. Not one fucking idea. It’s literally astonishing.
The Positives, Because I Like Ending on a High Note
First and foremost, these are the kind of points a team shouldn’t be surprised to drop. In the grand scheme of keeping ahead of the competition, the only points you really sweat are the ones you shouldn’t – and that’s a scale that never, ever stops sliding. And, yes, Portland’s on the wrong side of it. No, seriously, getting to the positives now...
Mosquera counts as a good piece – and to the extent that I dream of what he can do when he gets better players around him. Also, and as much as I questioned how far he had to drop to find it, I liked seeing Evander go as far back as he had to in order to get on the ball, if only because he needs to find his places within whatever system the Timbers have right now. It’s a lot of mess from there, but I guess this amounts to my argument that this team can’t move forward until it becomes some new player’s team. That’s a long way of saying I don’t think Evander has the juice, either on a performance level or in the locker room, to call the shots. And yet, I’m starting to see the outline of a concept.
It will always and forever be hard to trace the precise impact of a substitution – and that goes double for when the game-states shift (hey...throwback concept) - but Franck Boli looked like a good, if...let’s call it a-traditional addition to the mix described above. If I had to give a reason as to why I feel okay about taking a wait-and-see approach to all this, I’d answer that Mosquera, Evander and Boli are all new players. And then I’d back that up by reminding people that the Timbers haven’t been all that bad on defense so far this season. Except against Atlanta.
I won’t pretend this was a good night for Portland. Hell, I’ve got a laundry list of shortcomings and near-failures that I expect I’ll be fleshing out in the weeks ahead – e.g., is it just me, or did your eyes roll out of the back of your head when you saw anyone refer to David Ayala as a remotely important player on Portland’s roster? – but I’d go so far as to call myself confident that they Timbers will improve. Moreover, and related to a conversation started above, I count about a half dozen teams in the Western Conference that, right now, feel like good bets to race the Timbers to the cellar. Sad as that sounds – don’t get me wrong, this is like watching a three-legged race where everyone got animal tranquilizers shot in their asses as the starting whistle blew – it also gives the Timbers time to get their shit straightened out. Insofar as they can.
There are no guarantees, especially not with the rash of health scares Portland has lived with since...I’m going with 2020 – but I am, frankly, okay with this being a rebuild and/or taking some time. Regardless of whether one or both has been a great signing, The Organization (that so, so many of us hate) has shown a willingness to spend money. Even if that’s not keeping the team perfectly and ideally competitive...isn’t it trying?
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