San Jose Earthquakes 3-2 Portland Timbers: Lost, and Never Found

Won't lie. I wanted to do better with this....

Have you ever seen one of those old movies, or even a parody of one, where a central character whispers a dozen farewells on his/her way to the beyond?

The Portland Timbers gave their best homage to that trope tonight in a slow-fade 2-3 road loss at the San Jose Earthquakes. The foreground the blunt reality, San Jose wanted it more. Their energy was better, they contested the ball faster - or, in far too many cases, at all - and they just, for lack of a better word, competed tonight in a way the Timbers only did either one player or one moment or a time and, yes, the “or” in that clause is 1,000% conscious, deliberate, not a typo, etc.

As documented in two or three places, I expected goals in this game. Moreover, I expected the game to turn on which team scored the most goals - i.e., basic logic meets basic math - and it did. And, finally, I don’t know what happened to the Timbers tonight, I really don’t. Rather than say they gave up…tempting as that is, I feel alright letting them off the hook with, they couldn’t see the path forward, so they tried to walk directly into the trees. Big ones too.

Where to begin with dissecting this one? And is there a point to the project? Hold on. I'll find one or two...

To make up for cavalierly shitting on San Jose’s defense going into this one, I hereby acknowledge that Tommy Thompson, aka, The Goal-Less Wonder, waltzed his way to one step inside the penalty spot before a there-but-for-the-width-of-Bill-Tuiloma’s-boot the Timbers would have gone down 4-2. After a certain point - here, I’m thinking rather pointedly about the ‘Quakes’ second, jail-break-perfect counterattacking goal - everything about the game rhymed with that moment. Even the laws of gravity seemed to tilt against the Timbers from that point forward and, yes, now confirmed, Portland did something less than half of shit over the course of that second half.

I, like a lot of people, have waited patiently for the Timbers to find a rhythm and start doing something with it this season and assumed they would. Even if I didn’t trust it, I hoped that Portland’s 7-2 win over Sporting Kansas City had knocked off the rust…but, no. Moreover, assuming you stick with the implicit premise of my review - i.e., that an early goal invites teams to play toward Portland, which opens up space for their counter - well, the wheels fell all the fucking way off that one tonight. Once San Jose landed on a method to stuff the Timbers transition outlets - related, does anyone think that’s some state secret by now? - the game ended as a contest. For the record, that happened somewhere around the 65th minute. Or the 70th, in the event I want to spare anyone’s blushes.

Philadelphia Union 1-2 Portland Timbers: Opposite Day Was Fun, Mom!

Yeah, she's got a jet ski, but...

I’ve never been delighted to see so many of the (soft) expectations I had going into a game get up-ended (see twitter, JeffBull5). To start with an easy one, Jorge Villafana has made me nervous for as long as the Portland Timbers have dwelled in the blessed halls of The Magical Kingdom (now with working bathtub faucets and palatable lunches? presumably?), so an afternoon of watching highlights of the Philadelphia Union’s Brenden Aaronson tear up the right side of the field (that’s Portland’s left) made me wonder how much Jorge would have in the tank once Jim Curtin moved Aaronson inside and brought in Ilsinho to run at him. Villafana answered back with plenty, and then some! While I can’t say he locked down Portland’s left flank, he stretched the defensive equivalent of landmines and barbed wire across it and made Union attackers rue coming in there throughout the game.

My larger (largest?) anxiety was that Philly would spend the day absorbing pressure and timing their breakouts, something they’d proved adept at doing in every game through it’s long, and now-ended, journey through the Magical World of Major League Soccer (#MWoMLS). The Timbers rendered that broad strategy something short of requirements when Jeremy Ebobisse nodded home an early go-ahead goal (13th minute). Having watched that again (multiple times), I’m struck by where the Union went wrong: sure, Jack Elliott vacates the space around Ebobisse, but the way he chased Larrys Mabiala suggested, to me at least, that was part of the plan, even if that meant leaving Kai Wagner one-on-one against Ebobisse and Portland’s go-ahead goal says everything about how that went.

Before burying the lead too deep, the final score ended with the Timbers beating Philly 2-1, if by a quarter-man’s-body worth of width (feeling piratic themes; bear with me), the approximate measure by which Kacper Przybylko was legitimately offside when Aaronson squiggled through a clutch of Timbers defenders to set up what looked like the equalizer. Alas (for Philly fans), people interpret the rules by the rules (folly!) and, according to an exact reading of the rules, yes, Przybylko was, in fact, a quarter-man’s body offside, and thus endeth all talk of equalizers. Trust me, I hate it as much as you...

To draw back for a broader view, this game was built from a composite of game-states, and in a way not a lot of what I’ve watched from the MLS Is Back tournament have managed. I’m not saying one team or another hasn’t dominated the proceedings in this game or that (and gods know, I didn’t watch even 1/4 of all the games), so much as I’m saying this game felt tighter and less nakedly opportunistic than most of what I’ve watched so far. The trends/rhythms felt deeper, if nothing else. Then again, that could have been the agonizing process of the Union reorganizing around the concept of not scoring the first goal in a game…which they really had done in every game during this tournament until, oh, just a few hours ago. Back to those game-states…