Portland Timbers 2-1 Vancouver Whitecaps: An Easy Hazing

You need the neck, man. And the collarbones.

I’d made an agreement with myself to stop watching this one at the 80th minute until I saw the Portland Timbers pull a near-complete line-change. The Timbers were up 2-1, I knew how it ended and the Vancouver Whitecaps looked no more likely to steal the result than to earn it. All the same, if the preseason isn’t about watching the undercard talent, I don’t know why they do it. For better or worse – I’m inclined to better – the Timbers continued to pick off the Vancouver Whitecaps passes and generally keep the field tilted toward the ‘Caps’ goal after all those subs came on. Better, when the new guys came on, they seemed to hit the same angles on their passes and cut out Vancouver’s passes the same way; you might want a player with a different skill-set to come on to change the focus of the attack, but you want most of the team to play within the same system when they take the field, to look like they know how to play with others without thinking about it too hard. Portland did that on Sunday, and that’s promising.

Moreover, they could call in players like Jeremy Ebobisse, Julio Cascante and, yes, even Dairon Asprilla during that line change, guys with real MLS minutes and moments – and that’s before getting to semi-regular presences like Renzo Zambrano. Those late subs weren’t the first to come on – Marco Farfan replaced Jorge Villafana and Andy Polo replaced Yimmi Chara on the right at the half – and I think the Timbers need competition in those two spots as much as any other ones…now that I think about it, Portland has competition like that in a lot of spots, if with a fair number of clear favorites for each role.

Before going any further, I have a caveat about Vancouver: I don’t rate them for 2020, and I didn’t see anything in Sunday's game to change my opinion on that. Sure, they have some dangerous pieces: Ali Adnan (Jr.?) showed what he can do with a cross multiple times, including the one that created the ‘Caps well-worked goal. Several of their expected key players (e.g., Hwang Im-Beom, Markinovic and Lucas Cavallini) combined to make that happen, but outside that moment, they struggled to get the ball to Cavallini and the 'Caps struggled to get players around the ball anytime Cavallini had it. As much as Cavallini looked big, strong and effective, Vancouver seems to have found a head for its team (Cavallini) but without investing enough in a neck, or even a pair of collarbones. Even after that, the issues are global, whether it’s Derek Cornelius’ lightly bone-headed pair of gaffes (one of them, the penalty kick that Portland’s Felipe Mora had no need to sell to the ref), or the still impressive Yordy Reyna slicing through pockets of space (even if they lead to dead-ends). It’s not quite contempt, so much as an expectation that the Timbers will be one of several teams who will take advantage of Vancouver in the season ahead.

Because it’s preseason, I don’t need to dig too deep on anything, so kindly file all the above away as I tick through a handful of bullet points to close out.

Vancouver Whitecaps 1-0 Portland Timbers: Plus a Third Hand...

Yaaasss. (Also, is this the right Birdman for the reference. #shit.)

“Just like Birdman, hit you with a left, then a right, plus a third hand.”
- KOOL A.D.

Yeah, I know. That’s just what came to me for the title, so I wanted to at least give the source.

The litmus test for how you feel about the Portland Timbers’ 0-1 loss to the Vancouver Whitecaps at BC Place tonight has exactly one question in it: do you feel like the Timbers should have tied that game? If you answered no, yeah, this loss feels like a disaster. If you answer yes, well, that's the fun part: the answer is multiple choice.

I’ll start by borrowing from the Tale of Two Halves cliché (“it was the worst of times, and everyone else lived in London”), and call tonight’s loss A Tale of One-Third and Two-Thirds. Another soccer cliché comes in as well, e.g., playing on the front foot. I don’t think even Timbers fans would dispute that Vancouver outright owned the first 1/3 of the game; going the other way, I don’t think any ‘Caps fan would argue against ceding the final 1/3 of the game to the Timbers. The middle third feels a little more up for grabs, but within a Venn diagram that where the Tale of One-Third and Two-Thirds overlaps with parts of the Tale of Two Halves, and I can’t show you the wedges of each circle, so I’ll stop trying and switch to another line of argument.

If I had to weigh what Vancouver did against Portland in the first 1/3 of the game against what Portland did to Vancouver in the final 1/3, I see the scale tipping toward the Timbers. And that’s where the sub-title for this post came from (e.g., hitting someone from multiple sides), and why I feel OK about this loss. On the (theoretically) bleak side, I see tonight as a blown opportunity to investigate or, God forbid, seek to expand on the first team’s attacking potential, but that’s only leaving some personal, impractical theories on the table. Giovanni Savarese doesn’t have that luxury, just as no coach ever will, so I don’t remotely blame him for sticking with the Plan A that has brought the Timbers three straight wins. I just hope they can bottle whatever Savarese said or did to get the team geared up for that second half (is it amphetamines or is it Maybelline?), because it worked – and better than any of the time/space warping madness Portland used to beat Real Salt Lake last week.

And yet it gets weirder.