Portland Timbers 0-1 Atlanta United FC: The September of Our Discontent

Where does it say that "my ass can't pay"?

Is it possible I banked the points before the Portland Timbers cashed the check? Absolutely and with bells on. I was trying to convince both myself and the teller it would clear just fine all the way up to the 25th minute. The bluff came undone a few minutes later and all the promises of Portland’s 2026 roster couldn’t tape it back to together again for another pass. It might even jeopardize next month’s rent.

The question now: how much time do I spend on this?

Portland Timbers 0-1 Atlanta United FC
What Passes for a Match Report
After a night cap of poking around other results for slivers of hope, I just picked through the highlights and sifted the final stats for anything that might have slipped my mind. For what it’s worth, I think the Timbers whiffed another good chance that recalled the back-post opportunity Ariel Lassiter side-netted and someone teed up Vincent Jannsen for an offside attempt in the second. I also believe that covers everything. 17 shots by the Timbers? No shit?

For all that, Portland looked better prepared for the chaos of the opening 20 minutes; as noted in last night’s game thread, Atlanta looked all over the place. Kristoffer Velde has it in him to force a moment of magic in those situations (hold that thought), but it was Atlanta’s Aleksey Miranchuk who did the conjuring at the 28th minute. Finn Surman’s outlet wasn’t the best choice, by any means, but Portland had the defenders to manage the mischief, so no alarms sounded when Jimer Fory’s toe-poke missed the cross. It all went to shit – and I do mean it all went to shit – when Miranchuk chopped open an inside lane and looped a shot into James Pantemis’ goal. The Timbers fell down in that moment and, like they say on the TV, could not get back up.

Portland had some free kicks – Velde’s was decent, Lassiter’s less so – Velde almost nodded home on some smart combination play around and through Atlanta’s left by Lassiter and Cole Bassett – and I think that reads every promising moment into the record and includes the rest by implication. Atlanta got hold of the game after Miranchuk’s goal and their grip never slackened much. Most of the snarling the Timbers managed rose out of the never-ending spat between Velde and Matthew Edwards – and I’d hand the mind game between to the latter on points. Atlanta laid a deep boggy trap for any attempted transition on the defensive side and created the better chances to the final whistle. The end.

MLS Week 24 & 25 Review: Speed-Running & Scouting ALL the Opposition

Been there, bro...looks like you're eating a melon.

I’ve never been able to shotgun a beer and I feel the same way when Major League Soccer doubles up its Match Days (capitalized, right?). It’s too much to take in, trying to make it work feels like a one-way street to (yet another) whale post, and so on. Moreover, I’m not sure it’s all that valuable, especially with the way so many teams across MLS are spinning their wheels as the regular season turns into the final stretch.

It should go without saying now that, yes, I’m tinkering with the format. (Still searching for that Holy Grail post, doubt the quest will ever end.) Here’s the plan…

This post starts with a Big Picture State of the League hypothesis, then moves on to walking through the state of all the teams on either side of the Portland Timbers – in this case, the 7th-place Colorado Rapids down to the 14th-place Seattle Sounders. The primary goal in all this is to capture trends, states of progress or decline, that kind of thing, among the teams voted most likely to keep Portland 1) out of the playoffs, and 2) from doing anything once they get to the playoffs.

From there, I’ll move on to two conceptual sections I’m test-driving for future posts, something I’m calling Speed-Running the Eastern Conference and Western Conferences. The post will wrap up with a very brief (full disclosure: almost perfunctory) scouting report on the Timbers’ next opponent, Atlanta United FC. A couple new signings aside, that brevity is deserved on the grounds that Atlanta’s nine whole goddamn points below the Eastern Conference play-in line and not gaining ground.

That takes care of the preamble. Let’s kick this off with…

FC Dallas 2-1 Portland Timbers: The Big Picture Meets the Little One

Her soul's somewhere in there...

As anyone who tracks this blog or follows me on Bluesky knows, I’ve made a mantra of the argument that regular season games don’t matter in Major League Soccer. Today, I’d like to amend and extend that case into something more clarifying.

To be clear, the original argument still holds up. Any team that gets its shit together far enough ahead of Decision Day has the potential to get on a streak, get into the MLS Cup Playoffs and make some noise, maybe even snatch MLS Cup from a team that, based on their performance over the entire season, deserves it a little more. Thank gods the Supporters’ Shield still rewards that, no matter how little people value it.

The amendment/extension piece comes from something else, something that only stepped out of the background over the Portland Timbers’ past several struggling seasons. Upon reviewing their results, I started to notice the only teams Portland could beat were the ones either below the playoff line, or those slipping toward the wrong side of it. That is, the Timbers could only beat actually bad teams, or teams in bad form. Any time Portland played a team with even a little more than half of anything going on, two points or all three slipped away. I think my obsession with tracking results came before that, but this cemented the value of the exercise for me.

It’s not a perfect scale by any means. A crap team can beat a good team on any given day, of course, and even the best team can crap the bed. The thing to watch for is the persistence of the phenomenon – i.e., any season that sees your team reliably lose to the good teams deep enough into the regular season is a good one to give up on. It doesn’t mean they won’t make the playoffs – see the Timbers’ 2024 and 2025 seasons (on second thought, only look at the searing dead end of 2024 if you’re one of those freaks that watches replays of compound fractures…sicko) – it just means they will not make the final, they probably won’t even make the quarters, and they’re just the fodder on some other teams’ path to glory.

MLS Week 23 Review + a Wee St. Louis Scouter: May the Good Vibez Continue

A bit too on the nose...

So…fun fact: I took a longer look at three of the games I said “did not interest me” for the most American reason of all: I don’t like draws because they don’t give me much to work with. I am bound neither rules nor man…

I wouldn’t call MLS Week 23 “bad,” not in the formal sense, but the ground under my feet feels firm enough for me to argue that not a lot happened. Yeah, yeah, name an MLS Match Day when that doesn’t hold, but my feet won’t take one step off this soapbox till I’ve said my piece. That’s not the biggest deal, not with 11 games still remaining for most teams, but the gap between the good, the mid, and the irrelevant tightened a little on Saturday. For reference, the relevant lines break as follows, and in both conferences: 1-5 = good; 6-9 = mid; the rest = bad. That’s right, I said it. I’ll speak better of the teams below when they do better week in and out.

Speaking of, nearly every team the league has a midweek game this week. To paraphrase the inimitable, yet much-mocked Hudsucker Proxy, your future is now.

With that, it’s time to kick around last weekend’s results. As with every week’s edition (which have always existed and been reliably delivered since 1996, no, I have not shut down this blog three to four times), I value some results more than others and thus spend more time on them. In a reverse of last week’s post, this week’s post starts with those results, then speed-runs the rest. In the order I looked at ‘em…

Columbus Crew 3-0 Colorado Rapids
The prime directive here was to determine whether or not Colorado, of the now 2-9-1 road record, could win any road game. The highlights showed a team drowning over the opening 30 minutes and, despite spending most of the game only 0-1 down, never really recovering. The Rapids caught up on the numbers side before the final whistle, if just a little, but a Columbus team that hadn’t won in five games padded the final score smartly courtesy of goal contributions by new kid, Gonzalo Tapia; his tricky-shit goal, Columbus’ second, for reference. As for the Rapids, their home record (8-3-0 currently) looks like a good bet to get them to the playoffs, but all signs point to them needing to host if they want to go anywhere.

Portland Timbers 5-4 Minnesota United FC: How's Your Heart?

It was that kinda night.

When Vincent Janssen scored the third of his historic goals, I went through all the reactions – e.g., doubting I still knew how to count to three, looking for an offside flag to descend from the Heavens because Such Things Cannot Be. Polling the people around me came next – “that’s three, right? that was that specific player’s third goal?” – and, upon confirmation, I took a minute to just breathe in the moment. It’s not every day that a snake bite heals itself, you know?

About five minutes later, it occurred to me that the Portland Timbers could somehow piss away the win and the air suddenly didn’t taste the same. Was that the sulfurous tang of the smoke bombs that celebrated Portland’s (then) fourth goal, or the smell of a flatulent imp come to spoil the evening? When Minnesota scored their fourth goal (oof) with a cushion of added time still available (and with more time still added due to the Loons’ goal celebration), I crossed myself in both the Catholic and Orthodox traditions. One can never be too sure, no?

Portland Timbers 5-4 Minnesota United FC
What Passes for a Match Report
One could argue the game belonged to Janssen from the jump: the opening minutes saw him lose control of his first three touches and the Timbers struggled, collectively, over that same period. That gave the Loons at least one clear chance to take an early lead, maybe two, before Portland found their feet - viva la slow starts, I guess – but they hit a steady trot before scoring their first (all of that's probably in here, maybe even in here). A little give-‘n’-go set it up, allowing Jimer Fory to step clean into Minnesota’s penalty box (the little fucker) and forced Drake Callender into a flop save and a rebound. Minnesota CB Morris Duggan made the mistake of going to ground, where his raised leg sent Cole Bassett tumbling over (it looked like Bassett fell over him in real time) and Janssen to the penalty spot. Janssen’s kicked it home and sent the game into a frenzy. Before the final whistle blew, that game delivered more twists than a primetime soap opera featuring amnesia, a possession, and three affairs and at least one mystery murder.

MLS Week 22 Review & a Minnesota United FC Scouter, Just in Reverse.

Sweep the leg. Every time.

This post tested a new model for a Major League Soccer league-wide post and the experiment already failed. Not so much for anything specific to the post, but because it was only possible in a week where my schedule fit together just so. My schedule fits together just so, at most, quarterly.

At any rate, the concept carries forward what I did with the most recent level set – i.e., comment vaguely about how well each of the teams in MLS presents at this point in the season – and the content is still heavily results driven. To steal a concept from the players we all cheer on, I think it’s best to take things one game at a time as opposed to checking boxes you’re not even sure will appear in two weeks’ time. Where the level set centers the notes on teams, this post centers on results. Well, some results. And maybe not one that relates to your team.

Not all results are interesting, a statement that becomes truer as the season rushes to its end. For me, that continues all the way to bitter end, aka, Decision Day – i.e., what does getting a certain semi-fortunate match up in the first round of the playoffs matter when you don’t trust your team to beat anyone else? That’s a personal problem, obviously. I am the Cobra Kai coach deep down…

Back to it, I’ve grouped all of Week 22’s results (because that’s where most team are) into three groups below, as I’ll do every week (or aspire to do every week). Those are as follows:

1) Nothing to See Here, aka, the result in question tracked with reasonable expectations.

2) Noteworthy, aka, not a wild result, but something about it, whether big picture or small, felt worth flagging.

3) Surprise, Surprise, Surprise, aka, did not see that coming, might even be bit shit.

Portland Timbers 1-2 Austin FC: Outbelieved

Garfunkel, forever lingering behind...

I forgot the last time I thought xG was more or less made up, but when I look at the final stats…

Neither team needs a pat on the head that bad. Cringing over here...

I called this a must win on the usual grounds: any team with the beginning of a dream needs to take all three points from a home game against a shit road team on short rest. About that…

Portland Timbers 1-2 Austin FC
What Passes for a Match Report
I feel comfortable saying, and with minor exaggeration, that saying Austin looked better, both globally and marginally, over the first 87-ish minutes of that game covers the basics. They played the livelier game, used the ball to manage it, and held a defensive shape over 2/3 of the field that picked all the ideas out of Portland's back pockets (Paula Pomegranate Pumpernickel Penelope Paparazzi Putnam) before the Timbers could finish them. If I had to phrase the Timbers attacking posture in one word, I’d go with perplexed. A lot of nibbling at the edges for 87 minutes, basically.

Which made a problem of the fact Austin scored in the 25th minute. ‘Twas a lonely chance, an even lonelier goal, at least until the others came long, but Joseph Rosales give to Facundo Torres’ go did the trick, and Portland chased the game from there. And to the final whistle, if we’re being honest.

The Timbers equalized when Antony flicked the ball into (probably) Brendan Hines-Ike’s hand and subsequently received honors for taking the penalty (the penalty call should be somewhere in here, if not, RIOT!). I liked handing Antony the penalty kick, for what it’s worth, because why not show confidence in him so that he can regain the confidence he lost? Who doesn't love a redemption arc? Antony buried it – smartly, I might add – and Portland drew level at 1-1. Whenever the foul happened, the penalty was scored at the 89th minute. There I was, fat-thumbing my way through a clever summation of the game’s events…

…then Austin scored at the 94th minute, taking away the trash off of trash. A clean put-back on a desperate header, a fatal slip by Portland, hello, 11th place, darkness my old friend, etc.