San Jose Earthquakes (Oof) 4-1 Portland Timbers: I Believe the Term Is Jointly and Severally

The number of things that went wrong...

A team can survive a bad night at the office, being a step behind, connected only in sad little spurts, etc. A team cannot, however, survive a half dozen or so catastrophic defensive errors.

I call that kind of collapse a Five-Minute Fall Apart, even when they unfold over an 11-minute span. The rest of the game wasn’t much better and that’s the beginning of the story of how the San Jose Earthquakes rolled the Portland Timbers 4-1 tonight.

About the Game
The post started with a distinction between collective and individual failure for a reason: the Timbers committed sins both individually and as a team tonight, but they might have muddled through, even if just to a more respectable final score, had, say, both Finn Surman and Kamal Miller not bit like half-starved basses on the pieces of bait San Jose dangled before them. Their mistakes turned into the (borderline) sitters that put the game beyond Portland’s likely longest reach inside the first 30 minutes. Maxime Crepeau could have done better on both shots – the man’s head and feet didn’t seem to have an open channel, on the second goal more than the third, for me – and, as much as I get wishing James Pantemis was there, that does everyone the same amount of good as wishing Surman didn’t overcommit all the way into Nevada on the ball into Ousseni Bouda, or that Miller didn’t sprint all the way to the left sideline just to get nutmegged by DeJuan Jones. That’s the individual stuff and I feel confident arguing that three-minute span killed Portland’s chances at three points tonight. Moving on to the stuff that made even one point unlikely…

San Jose scored their first goal on their third (or fourth) run at the same attacking movement – i.e., push the ball outside to a runner sprinting to get around the Timbers’ widest defender on one side or the other, then pull it back to an attacking player who drifted into the space left open by a Portland backline that appears willing to collapse into its own damn goal. Seeing them come close mere minutes before the 90th on the same damn play felt like the right way to wrap up the game, but the problem was always the same. When San Jose pushed the ball wide, an Earthquake player curled off Portland’s defensive line and none of those players tracked that movement; Timbers midfielders – e.g., Joao Ortiz was the closest available option on their first goal – failed to run back to cover that run, leaving some quality attackers with time and the full width of the goal to fire at from around the penalty spot. Under those circumstances, whose man is that? The answer falls somewhere between everyone’s, no one’s and the first player to see him peel off. And that’s the, or maybe just a, collective failure.

Portland had decent periods at the start of each half, about 10-15 minutes where they played through San Jose’s high defensive line (didn’t feel like a whole damn press) and made some promising gestures toward the Earthquakes’ goal. And they did pull back a goal just before halftime – a good one, too, all the way down to its component parts – so when they started the second half well enough, it was possible (and in no way desperate) to tell yourself they had a shot at rescuing a point, if only, etc. Even that half ended with San Jose cracking the code and running with a good balance of numbers back toward Crepeau’s goal again and again; the official stats don’t really capture the problem. As anyone who watched tonight saw, San Jose came within Arango’s kneecap and a penalty non-call that I’m still questioning with a grassy knoll kind of curiosity (see the full highlights; ones from the knoll to come later; I have a DHS coming), but they ultimately put the game away with an unbeatable shot by Bouda to beat Crepeau near-post.

Just hear me out, okay?

An Aside on San Jose
While it doesn’t quite rely on it, my scouting process gets a big boost from catching the right stray note during the portion of whatever broadcast I’m watching. The prime example from tonight was the chatter about the ‘Quakes ranking at or near the top of MLS on the xG-ometer. 100% true or not, missing that detail moved me to discount San Jose’s attack – and who knows how close I would have come to writing it off entirely had I known Josef Martinez couldn’t start – and that turned out to be a blind spot. Going too far in the other direction – i.e., these guys are unstoppable – makes even less sense, even with San Jose as the leaders for goals scored at time of typing. Some things I feel good about saying: even if he can’t provide a like-for-like replacement for Martinez, Bouda played a great game, both leading the line and playing behind it; with Arango doing the same and Espinoza running riot behind it, the ‘Quakes left the Timbers a step behind all over the pitch and on both sides of the ball. That teed them up for a full-field defensive scheme that mostly kept Portland away from their 66%-green backline (Daniel Munie’s in his third season and Max(?) Floriani’s a rookie). I won’t say I underestimated San Jose, so much as I’ll allow that their only really disappointing result was that 3-5 loss to Sporting KC (Portland’s next opponent, for those not keeping track at home) and that they played tough away games (at LAFC and Columbus) on either side of that, i.e., some losing streaks make more sense than others. The Timbers played a bad one tonight, no question, but this still felt like the ‘Quakes showing they have a little life.

An Expanded Collection of Thoughts
1) The Biggest Takeaway
Move on. Regroup. Treat this as a game that never happened, but also one to furiously analyze to correct all the things that went wrong. It’s complicated…

2) A Twist in the “Defense Is Better” Conversation
I already flagged the disasters above, but I also very much want to circle back to the fact that Portland gave up seven goals over the three games before this one. Tonight’s loss expanded their recent average for goals allowed/game from 2.333 to 2.75. The Timbers played only one actually shit team during that time – the Galaxy – but even they slipped two goals past them. Given San Jose’s patterns – e.g., the whole “highest xG” datapoint – what happened tonight feels a lot like what one would expect to happen against that kind of team. So, to ask again, is Portland’s defense better?

3) In Praise of Individuals
David Ayala’s two-way game has evolved into what I believed it could be – something like David Guzman, but with tackling. Even with his failure to cover, as noted above, acknowledged and entered into the record (though, honestly, I don’t see how he catches up to that play) I thought Ortiz played a good enough game tonight that I want to see more of him (or of Cristian Paredes) than I want to see of Diego Chara (gotta get there, folks), and I thought Claudio Bravo looked genuinely good going forward the entire night. The latter’s defensive contribution wasn’t stellar, and you can set your watch against his knack for getting caught up field, but this also goes back to the same individual/collective thought that started the post: players – and not just the ones listed in this section – did plenty of things just fine tonight. They just didn’t do them often enough, throughout the game, and in a way that lifted the team to victory.

That feels like a good place to leave this: somewhere between the sum of the parts and the sum of the performances, the Timbers fell short in San Jose. And, as a more or less direct result, San Jose kicked their asses. On to the next game…