San Diego FC 0-0 Portland Timbers: A Little Satisfaction, a Little Future Trepidation & a Wrap Up of the West

With, like, a lot of shit left out.

This post also counts as my first/second stab at a new format/concept. On the most basic level, it involves: 1) kicking around (or just kicking) the Portland Timbers’ most recent result; 2) a quick tour around the relevant parts of the Western Conference for perspective on the grand scheme; and 3) a quick check-in with the team Portland plays next (the Dread Pirate Minnesota). I’m going to hit this at the highest stream-of-consciousness speed I can manage – about all I can do four days late, but I pledged to drag myself through this, gritted teeth, bad taste and all.

Close readers may have noticed I identified this as a first for a new format and, paraphrasing one of the worst we'll-do-it-in-post moments in the Star Wars universe, that’s true from a certain point of view – specifically, I switched the order after the sections on last Saturday’s game, so that the Scouting Memo (I tightened it up), aka, the only forward-looking portion of the post, comes at the end, which is the opposite of what I did for the FC Cincinnati post. (No need to read that; already forgotten.)

There will actually be a third iteration this weekend, when I post notes on the game and then the other bits later. At any rate…

I just sat through the highlights to reconnect with this game. The first that struck me was the full minute of the 7:30 burned on the VAR review for the Andres Dreyer “goal” called back for offside around the 30th minute. I had a joke in the hopper about that being the only actual event of the game, but the rest of the highlights and the final stats painted a better memory for this game than the World of Imagination in my mind. It was still pretty damn dull, but, hey, little Ws have big hearts.

San Diego FC 0-0 Portland Timbers
About the Game, Briefly and Broadly
Is it possible that Corey Baird, formerly of FC Cincinnati (formerly of Houston Dynamo FC, formerly of LAFC, formerly of Real Salt Lake), coming off was the single most significant event of the game? It’s possible, sure: he played two drop-flicks that sent Dreyer free-‘n’-easy behind Portland’s back line, including the one that teed off Dreyer’s offside shot. The drought only looked more apparent thanks to San Diego’s failure to post even one shot on goal over the second half. They had a couple, just not many. Even so, I wouldn’t have believed MLS’s newest kids put just one shot on goal all game if the stats didn’t swear to it…and, yep, even that one shot on goal followed from the earlier Baird/Dreyer connection. The sum of that feels a tenuous combination of promising (for Portland) and significant (for San Diego), with the emphasis on tenuous.

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.