Portland Timbers 1-3 Houston Dynamo FC: Not Even Remotely Fun for as Long as It Lasted

This, but with her stepping on his hand.

The worst thing about the Portland Timbers’ 2023 season comes with the way it let them surface and actually see the life-raft before cruel gods, Houston Dynamo FC, et al, shoved their heads back under.

That metaphor came to me disturbingly early in Portland’s whimpering 1-3 loss to Houston tonight. The Timbers fell out of the lifeboat early and they never much looked like getting back into it. Just defeat painted in lurid orange all over Providence Park. I couldn’t call them a good team, never mind the better one, because Houston had both boxes checked by the time they scored the opening goal.

A one goal loss would have hurt, sure, but this gets back to the opening metaphor. Houston took a weed-whacker to every green-shoot of either relief (e.g., the halftime whistle) or hope (e.g., Dairon Asprilla coming on 14 minutes too late to yank the ever-struggling Yimmi Chara) that held any promise of turning things around for a team that never shifted all the way out of baffled. That each act took the form as concrete and immovable as a goal (relive the pain; it’s for morale or solidarity, I can’t remember which anymore) felt like the hand pushing Portland back under once, then twice.

Oh, well. There goes that season…

Fun and great as it was that Miles Joseph got Portland to where they would make the playoffs with a win, that same middling level of achievement left them hanging from a ledge, from which any slip whatsoever (e.g., a single, yet total loss) meant missing those same playoffs. I painted pinks and other pastels over this season until the cans ran out – gods return my eyes, I talked myself into believing the defense wasn’t cold percolating dogshit – but one word writes the Portland Timbers’ 2023 into the history books: fragility. Here’s to hoping I can make that word stand up, walk around and impress the swells.

Club de Foot Montreal 1-4 Portland Timbers: A List of Things Not to Do in Future Sporting Events

That really feels more "on."

God have mercy on my soul, but I went back to see if I could find The One Wrong Thing that led to the Portland Timbers' crushing and potentially fatal 1-4 loss in Canada France to Club de Foot Montreal. I blame Reddit. Reddit is to blame…

Because Bryan Acosta caught so much flaming shit, I made the decision to watch where he was throughout the periods around the four goals Montreal scored last night – which, as careful readers already know, doesn't make a lick of sense because Acosta came off before L’Impact scored goals three and four. Those flies in the ointment aside, I had a theory I wanted to test, specifically, the potentiality that the Timbers defense/midfield failed due to the fact that they manned it with three players – Evander, Santiago Moreno and, yes, lumping Acosta into that bunch – who are, at a minimum, more inclined to think about what’s ahead of them than the flailing, half-panicked defenders behind them.

Before digging into what I saw, I had a lot of arguments from other people in my head before I sat down for the replay – e.g., theories about Montreal overloading the space either Juan David Mosquera or Claudio Bravo left open by pushing both too high and naked (i.e., without cover), gripes about Portland’s failings on transition defense, or something as simple as Larrys Mabiala being to old/slow for the game-plan – and that was on top of the narc-ish craving to blame it all on trying to fit Acosta into a No. 6 shirt that simply doesn’t fit him…

...wouldn’t you know, it was simpler than all that.

To be clear, Acosta does not appear to wear the No. 6 shirt comfortably or well – and do file that away for the future – but he really was in or around the places he should be in the crucial moments. That’s to say, he may not have managed the job well, but his positioning wasn’t the problem. Moreover, 1) that wasn’t the Timbers’ biggest problem, and 2) I’d put good money on Kwadwo Opoku burning 70% of MLS’s d-mids with the turn that created the chaos that led to Montreal’s second goal. And, to circle back to problems, the way Portland’s back three got stranded on that play was their biggest defensive problems yesterday afternoon.

Portland Timbers 2-0 Los Angeles FC: A Step (Over What May Be a Corpse) in the Right Direction

Night, night, gram-gram.

Because this game wasn’t that complicated, and because I’m about to check out until the end of September, I’ll keep the game summary for the Portland Timbers comfy-cozy 2-0 win over Los Angeles FC short.

It opened with a long, barren period – see the xG graph because it gets things mostly right – which left the game open for one of those pivotal moments. LAFC’s ‘keeper, John McCarthy, delivered with a swing and a miss at an Evander corner. His bobble bounced in front of the goal until Larry Mabiala did the simple thing of running toward it and heading it into the goal. Gods only knew what would happen from there, but it looked like a long stretch of nothing at that point.

I saw some chatter about LAFC getting back into the game during the latter half of the first one, but the only evidence I saw was an intermittently effective press and a couple smart shots from the left channel to the right post. All that didn’t amount to much – and I’m not the only one to think that; the on-screen halftime stats had the Timbers up 1.6 to 0.09 on xG (no typo on that zero behind the decimal).

The game ended according to everything but the final whistle fairly early in the first half. Portland scored an insurance goal so nice they insured it twice (seriously, watch it again for Santiago Moreno’s tulle-soft back-heel to Claudio Bravo alone) and LAFC only got worse from there. The Timbers had at least two more chances to dig them a deeper hole – and that’s on top of three more where a team that needed to make something happen would have pushed harder to make it so – and the game just kind of petered out from there. I mean that in the best way, honestly: there are few things I appreciate more in soccer than watching a team kill off a game softly, and the Timbers did that tonight. On a physical level, it didn’t take much more than a soap opera villain seeing that ill-gotten inheritance by leaning a little harder into the pillow smothering grandma’s face.