The Space In-Between: Catching up on MLS, the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati

Perfection is perfection, Mike Brady.

Major League Soccer’s offseason has lasted long enough for me. With an eye to keeping limber and toned, I’ll be tracking the league the same way I always do: once a week and from somewhere between a bird’s eye view and an airplane flight path. I will drill down on Thing 1 (Portland Timbers) and Thing 2 (FC Cincinnati) when there’s something to talk about with either – more on that below – but I’ll never see enough about any of the other teams to go granular on them. Fair warning.

Whether this starts a tradition or steps off from the wrong foot, I’m going to talk about MLS as a whole first – not least because the main point there applies to every team in MLS, including Thing 1 and Thing 2. (No, I’ll stop that right now…and has anyone ever done a version of that using penises for the “things”?)

When I read through (most of) Matt Doyle’s (aka, The Armchair Analyst’s) 2018 Global Review (which takes some time), two loose concepts kept surfacing: first, and most important, it gets a little easier every season for teams to lose touch with the pack in MLS, never mind the leaders; think your pudgier cyclists during the Tour de France. For those who journey through Doyle’s Labyrinth, you won’t read a naked and proud positive about any team until you get to the Number 18 spot (of 23 MLS teams), where he notes that Mauro Manotas balled out for the Houston Dynamo in 2018, scoring 25 goals across all competitions. The teams below Houston’s playoff-dodging squad are 2018’s pudgy cyclists – e.g., your San Jose Earthquakes, Orlando City SCs, the Colorado Rapids, the Chicago Fire, Toronto FC – the squads who put one foot in front of the other here and there last season, but never enough to really be part of the playoff conversation. Doyle used a really clean call-response to sum up Orlando’s season, but the same applied to them all (and Houston, honestly, and probably Minnesota United FC too):

“DISAPPOINTMENT: The whole season, really.”

Still, one team underlines the point about falling behind better than the rest: San Jose. They ended 2018 the worst team in MLS, none of their signings returned on investment, the head coach, Mikael Stahre, never really settled in and got yanked before the end of the season (having built no confidence), and Chris Wondolowski aged another year. Shit was bleak, basically, even if admirably scrappy. San Jose also won the Supporters’ Shield in 2012 with a sound defense and a set of brawlers for forwards. The league moved on, the ‘Quakes fell behind, and, despite some effort (but….the world’s longest outdoor bar?!), they haven’t yet figured out how to catch up. Every team in MLS: This could be you. You don’t want this to be you, so don’t let it be you.

MLS Cup & A Season Review from an Unreliable Narrator

Is safe, comrade.

I’ll start with my post-match analysis of MLS Cup 2018: the Portland Timbers lost.

What? Matchday Central never put up a...but…fine.

To start, I didn’t mind the way the Portland Timbers approached MLS Cup; the coaching staff actually impressed me a little. They set the line of confrontation higher than I expected, but that worked out, at least until a goal forced them to chase the game. Prior to that, Portland did a good job keeping Atlanta United FC in front of them. I hadn’t looked at the box score till now and…wow, that’s a balanced game, even to the point of equilibrium. Well, everywhere else but the score sheet. And that’s how you lose a game, people.

Here’s the thing with the last game of a season: there isn’t much to say beyond who won and who lost. No matter how feverishly the players itch for that shot a redemption, the next game won’t come till the next season. And what happened was really simple: Portland let in two crap goals, both of them dismal two-steppers. The broadcast team lamented the heavy touch by Jeremy Ebobisse on the first goal, but it was Ebobisse’s search for a better pass that slowed him down long enough for Michael Parkhurst (dude, not the fastest) to pick the ball off his toe. Parkhurst’s tackle left nothing between Josef Martinez and Portland’s yawning goal but Liam Ridgewell’s failure to stick all the way in. In a bit of cosmic unfairness, Ridgewell starred again on the second goal, this time by losing track of Josef “Single-Season-Fucking-Scoring-Record” Martinez, who would knock a header to a streaking Franco Escobar at the back post, aka, the guy Jorge Villafana lost. Two massive two-step mistakes, two goals, and the rest of it becomes what might have been – e.g., what if Ebobisse powered the ball across the goal instead of cushioning the deflection too near Atlanta ‘keeper, Brad Guzan? Had the Timbers leveled the score four-five minutes after Atlanta’s opener, who knows what might have been?

I fretted a little theatrically over Ebobisse’s mental state in a since-deleted tweet, but that’s misplaced nonsense because good players learn from mistakes. We’ll see how he handles this one, not just next season, but over the next couple; that’ll drop the relevant hints on Ebobisse’s ceiling. On that, Ridgewell had a bad night, an unfortunate capper on a season where he’d shown the mental resilience of three men by swallowing a benching and surviving an injury to become a key steadying influence during the MLS Cup run. How far did he climb in my mind: a trip down memory lane revealed that I’d written Ridgewell out of the team’s script somewhere in the middle of the season (Game 17, as it happens). The man enjoyed a side of redemption with his solid season, basically.

Atlanta United v. Portland Timbers: An MLS Cup Preview That Devolves Into Animal Metaphors

Spirit animal.

[Ed. – For those interested only in a breakdown/preview of MLS Cup, skip down to the double asterisk. For everyone else…let’s dig in.]

I went to bed two nights ago with the grand ambition of scouting Atlanta United FC by watching three of their archived: their two 2018 post-season home wins and their home win over the Montreal Impact back in April. I’d whittled that down to two games last night – the 3-0 home rout over the New York Red Bulls (patoo-patoo, [salt over my left shoulder], [cross myself in both the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox tradition], a pox, and may such an abomination never come to pass until 2019, amen) and the Montreal game.

I realized I’d already watched the win over the Red Bulls by the second minute (why didn’t I remember watching it? While I was stone-cold sober, my wife talked over that whole damn game, hence the hole in my head), and decided I’d only watch the Montreal game. That’s when I learned that ESPN+’s archived footage would only let me go back to November 1...

…and so, thankful that circumstances saved me from my most excessive impulses, I just read some stuff and watched a couple videos of people doing the lifting for me. Like a normal person.

** After a week of being completely checked out of MLS, I don’t have a ton of specifics on what will help or hurt the Portland Timbers when they battle Atlanta for MLS Cup. After a battle of my own – How MLS Organizes Content on its Home Page versus Me (MLSoccer.com won; seriously, it takes a fucking divining rod to tick through their content) – and considering those inputs, here are my take-aways.

The Layout Favors Atlanta, but There Is No Underdog

In the one in-depth preview video I found (before giving up; work on it, a-holes), Taylor Twellman and Matt Doyle (also Calen Carr) made smart comments about Atlanta’s greater flexibility in terms of how they can attack, and I think those are accurate. Doyle leaned harder into the argument that Portland is a one-trick pony – e.g., stay organized (a word that needs refining) and counter – but the Timbers are really good at that trick; moreover, “really good” leveled up to fucking great around the beginning of October. Better still, this “you had one job” style of play travels well. I don’t know whether to call it irony or accidental brilliance, but the MLS home page’s article on that same point puts more time into talking about the Timbers’ other long-suit instead: how thoroughly capably this team plays for another. Portland has been on the same sentence of the same page for the entire post-season, something that has made them so damn hard to beat that no team has.

To the extent Atlanta holds an edge, those factors – e.g., a reliable game-plan that every player understands and believes in – push back against it.

Sporting Kansas City 2-3 Portland Timbers: Conditioned to Believe

You are my God, there is no other.

Where to begin? With the ass-clenching anxiety of the final 30+ minutes, the beside-myself joy, or empathy for Sporting Kansas City for having the year they had and, yeah, Zarek Valentin probably really should have been sent off for a second yellow…

…then again, I’m good with that so long as you are…and, clearly, I’m only addressing persons outside the greater Kansas Citys, MO/KS and/or Seattle, WA metro areas. That was fucking incredible, right, a miracle on frosted grass (they play on grass in KC, right?), and a smoldering tribute to the lately infectious power of positive thinking?

As alluded to in the penumbra between the words above, the Portland Timbers advanced to MLS Cup 2018 on the back of a 3-2 road win in Kansas City, MO. Exactly two teams of 18 left Children’s Mercy Park with a win in all of 2018, a fact that threads garish neon threads around Portland’s accomplishment for tonight. And, for the record, I’m entirely serious about sparing a thought for everyone involved in the Sporting Kansas City organization and fan base (except the assholes who threw shit on the field after Portland’s second, stumbling goal; and, while I’m on it, has anyone else ever seen a coach step out to appeal to his crowd’s better angels like Peter Vermes did tonight (#StockRising)?). They believed every bit as inordinately in SKC’s odds of victory as Timbers fans believed in their own going into tonight (i.e., most of the hiccups in faith were my own), but that surely dissolved the second after Diego Valeri sank to his knees in disbelief after he scored his make-your-own-luck header (e.g., the "second, stumbling goal" noted above). I’ve never felt as close to him as I did in that moment (I'm buyin' the rounds, Diego!). And then Valeri got another one, and off the counter that would always follow so long as SKC pressed too high and the Timbers had available outlets…

…sorry, pausing again. Does this feel like ecstasy to anyone else? I mean the drug, not the state of mind. I’m just really, really happy right now, and on the grounds that, holy shit…the Timbers did it. They did all of it. Three fucking goals, in Kansas City, which, for what it’s worth, equals exactly 1/6 of the goals allowed in Kansas City during the regular season. (In the event I’m phrasing that badly, SKC allowed 18 goals at home during the regular season (the source of my math), and three goals tonight.)

I’m grasping at quantity because it’s tangible. But there’s nothing tangible about Sebastian Blanco’s equalizer, aka, the goal he seemed destined to score since 2018 started. That shit is permanently transcendent, just like Dairon Asprilla’s equalizer against Seattle about a month ago; it’s lore for the fan-base, a permanent, defining “where were you moment” that people will share – something that goes double if the Portland Timbers manage to claw their way all the way to the top, aka, hoisting MLS Cup to the sky for the second time in the franchise's short history.

Portland Timbers 0-0 Sporting Kansas City: "He's Had a Poor Night, John" Signed Stu Holden

The waiting is, and is not, the hardest part.

To start with the oft-repeated conventional wisdom from the broadcast – which I happen to agree with – neither the Portland Timbers nor Sporting Kansas City minds this result. To get all the prognostication(/bullshit) out of the way, the dynamics of the return leg play to Portland’s strengths, and for the same reason that this first leg played against them: Portland lived by transition all season, and the second game will put them back in their best shoes.

At the same time, yes, this result was not ideal (maybe; see closing arguments) and, as much as I think the Timbers have the game-plan/personnel to win any one game, 1) there are easier things than winning on the road against Sporting Kansas City, and 2) they could have won “any one game,” say, tonight, but they didn’t…and doesn’t that explode that particular fallacy? So, no, not the ideal outcome – give me what Atlanta did to the Red Bulls, only against SKC – but that’s where my thoughts on tonight’s pregnant, goal-less draw really start:

What specific thing would you have had otherwise? Or, from the other side, which Portland player made a defining mistake, or even generally failed to execute in today's goal-less home draw?

Blame Stu Holden for the title: that was close to his final assessment on Dairon Asprilla, and that wasn’t my thought for him. Sure, Dairon Asprilla killed a couple of attacks, but I’d still rate him at better than his regular season average on the night (if a couple steps below his prime-time playoff prime). More often, though, he and every player in Timbers green stayed composed on the ball, made good decisions/passes, made even better defensive reads, and generally took the game to Sporting KC. Asprilla’s better than average spread around the team to where I saw Zarek Valentin hold down right back as if he dropped anchor there; Jorge Villafana got into the attack wide, inside and judiciously; David Guzman defended better, smarter and more aggressively than he has all season, and Jeremy Ebobisse played bounces like ballet and, holy cow, do I have questions there (What, exactly, was the coaching staff waiting for from this kid?). On top of that, Diego Valeri looks 30 all over again, Sebastian Blanco’s influence continues to grow and Diego Chara needs a firehouse named in his honor right now as in no point in waiting and the people at the cutting ceremony better be damned important. If your primary definition of God is omnipresence, what is Chara but God?

The complicated truth of this moment is that the Portland Timbers are playing as well right now as they have all season. That’s great because it has carried them as far as it has – for those in need of a reminder, heading into the second leg of a playoff series, dead even in everything but (by all accounts, considerable) home-field advantage – but less great because they couldn’t put even one finger on the scale against Sporting KC, and at home.

Seattle Sounders 3(2)-3(4) Portland Timbers: Love Hangover

It's on me, guys. @ me.

I can’t remember whether I wrote it or tweeted it – and I’m not about to find it - but sometime in the very recent past I said that I never needed to see Dairon Asprilla in a Timbers uniform again. Yes, that sentiment resides at the intersection of harsh and ruthless, and you can go ahead and call me a bastard for it, but, obviously, 1,000 erotic poets banging away on 1,000 typewriters and stoned on “molly” could not express my appreciation for the man and his works in last night’s absolutely fucking glorious victory over the Seattle Sounders. In Seattle. Just…savor it. I re-watched the highlights just now and I want a gif of the little dance Asprilla did after slamming the winning penalty kick past “The Dread” Stefan Frei for Christmas.

While I’m in the business of giving shout-outs to Timbers I’ve recently crapped on, I want to single out/salute Andy Polo for setting the tone at “never-say-die-motherfucker” over the match’s opening 20 minutes. Until Jair Marrufo pulled him aside for a little chat, Polo played like he wanted to fight not just the Sounders starting eleven, but every last one of the 40,000 Sounders fans in attendance.

I’ll close out the introductions with a nod to Marrufo, who let both teams play in a way that was brave, even gutsy, and fair. No quarter was asked, and no quarter was given between the teams and credit to Marrufo for toeing what could have been a damned precarious line.

Getting into the usual (or sometimes?) fine-tooth combing over tactics, goals, or game states feels misplaced, like talking about the brush strokes of a beautiful painting instead of stepping back to appreciate the whole thing. Another factor: with all the goals came late in the match, I couldn’t remember half of them (aka, around the time “the root kicked in”); factually, I couldn’t remember even one of Seattle’s goals this morning* and, given my understanding of how trauma works, that’s something. Asprilla’s headed goal, on the other hand, somehow set up permanent, immovable residency in my mind, like one of those “core memories” in Inside Out.

(* Having now relived them – this one and this one, in particular – God bless the root and keep it holy. The intensity of…just everything swallowed up the sheer awfulness of the mistakes involved. Holy shit, how’d the Timbers get out of there alive?)

Diana Ross recorded a song called “Love Hangover” back when, and that’s very much part of my personal hangover collection this morning. Sounders head coach Brian Schmetzer called this “the most painful loss of my career.” Coming at the experience from the opposite side, this goes down as my favorite all-time Timbers victory. Yes, even more than winning MLS Cup in 2015.

This morning, I am sloppy with happiness.

There were moments of doubt last night – none more sticky and ominous than the goal Raul Ruidiaz scored that would have put the Sounders through to the Western Conference finals. I worried that the Timbers had spent too much time absorbing waves of Sounders attacks; I wasn’t sure the team could re-orient to punching back, not just on the road and in that particular stadium. As they did when they went down a goal in the first leg, the Timbers clapped back just 10 minutes later. The gloom and anxiety never had time to settle.

Along the same lines, the way Portland opened the game made little room for doubt. They back four defended lustily, winning just about every battle they were called on to fight; I’ll admit that Alvas Powell scared the holy living shit out of me here and there, but he held up, Jorge Villafana put out at least two fires that threatened to rage, and both Liam Ridgewell and Larrys Mabiala won a little place in my heart forever. Every Timbers player on the field dusted himself off every time he got knocked down and was back in the fight seconds later. I’m fully aware of how over-the-top all this reads, but this is as good an occasion for hyperbole as any I’ve experienced. Just freaking incredible.

In one my preview tweets yesterday, I wrote something about how the Timbers wouldn’t be where they are without the players who held the team together when the starters were down. And that’s why I want to close this mash-note with Andres Flores. I don’t think any player on the field played as many shitty passes as Flores did; in the attacking third, especially, “wayward” charitably describes the worst of his passes. All the same, Flores is a dude one season out of the NASL and last night he played in one of the biggest games in the Timbers’ MLS history, and with 40,000 people watching and willing him to fuck up. (In a moment of clarity last night, I finally understood why the crowd really matters; took me 40+ years; I’m slow.) Flores held it together. The whole damn team did, and that’s magical.

The Portland Timbers needed every player on its roster last night, just as they did all season long. I know I’ll be back to calling out players and putting sharp questions to their personal livelihoods. And, yeah, that makes me a bit of a bastard. This morning, though, I want to buy every man on the team a drink, one of those big colorful fancy ones with garnishes and novelty umbrellas, the whole damn nine-yards. Hit me up, guys. There’s room on my credit card.

Portland Timbers 2-1 Seattle Sounders: Success, Wheatfields, and Andy Polo

Middle fingers, all of 'em. YEEAAHHHH!!!

I showed up late to the game, mostly because I like to skip the National Anthem. (Honestly, I’m patriotic and appreciative as the next guy, I’m just not a fan of enforced rituals.) From the moment I walked in all the way through the Seattle Sounders’ opening goal, I never saw a Timbers’ player touch the ball in anything but desperation. In so many words, the omens didn’t favor victory.

I got no better sign of how much this series matters to Portland Timbers fans than the freakin’ wheat-field’s worth of middle fingers that went up all around my section (210) after Jeremy Ebobisse knocked in a finish beyond his years. Just to note it, the more I watch this kid play the more my brain silently repeats, “buy in, buy in, buy in.” Those voices in my head have no idea how hard that is for me.

This game’s actual miracle moment came when Diego Valeri dribbled through at least two tackles and flailed in the aftermath of one more to feed Sebastian Blanco the game-winner. After Blanco shrugged off some Sounders drapery to knock his goal past Seattle goalkeeper Stefan Frei, the sea of middle fingers rose again and underlined just how big this series feels in these parts. Is that healthy? Probably not, but that’s what’s going on and, golly, was I happy to take in the game live and in person. The mob mentality must have got to me because both my middle fingers shot up after both goals; this shit is infectious. The second goal was doubly satisfying after watching Cristian Roldan limp toward the farthest possible point of the sideline before stepping off the field. I have no idea why that pissed me off as much as it did, but I’m confident that Ted Unkel’s ultra-passive calls slid a burner under that and heated it to boiling. I want to sit down with him and ask how he only raised one yellow card through the length of that match…and I’m willing to listen.

After two late misses (one for either team) and an offside goal for the Timbers, that was all she wrote (here, I assume the author is Agatha Christie). Most importantly, the Timbers recovered from getting run over and scored on early to take a sadly slim 2-1 lead in this playoff series. As amazing as that was in the moment, it’s going to take some doing to make that score hold up in the second leg. A 1-0 Seattle win in Seattle is all it will take to send the Sounders through and that score-line fits that teams profile like personally-crafted skinny jeans (even my butt would look good). All the same, this win gives Portland a chance and, deeply apprehensive as I am about the road ahead, that’s all I can ask for, really.

FC Dallas 1-2 Diego Valeri: Call It a Post-and-a-Half...

OUR LORD AND SAVIOR.

The nice thing about playoff games is that they are fully and entirely present. A future of any kind exists for only one of the teams and that reduces everything to a series of moments - e.g., Diego Valeri (literally) slamming home a free-kick (and after FC Dallas players/fans had their beating hearts ripped from their chests), or Jeff Attinella smartly positioning his head to deflect a sure goal off his crossbar. C’mon, you know Jeff went low and kept his head high on that…a master class in misdirection.

And yet, I find myself wanting to talk about nothing but those little steps up the several flights of secret stairs that brought the Portland Timbers to this ripe moment of possibility, and a 2-1 win over FC Dallas in Texas. The total number of staircases falls a little short of the Winchester Mansion, but the Timbers gave old lady Winchester a run for her money…and for saner, séance-free reasons.

Portland’s game-winning goal contained a couple of the elements - e.g., David Guzman, who served the perfect pass to Jeremy Ebobisse, and Ebobisse for having the strength to shrug off the defender hanging off his shoulders (Reto Zeigler, right?), and the speed to elude a sprawling, stranded Jesse Gonzalez, to feed the assist to Valeri, who, just to note it, looks spring-flower fresh at the moment. To credit one of the other final pieces to Portland’s best-possible puzzle, Liam Ridgewell has looked like a DP defender since coming back from a variety of ailments, both physical and mental. Tonight’s win displayed the benefits of having players fill in the spaces around the guys who drive the team - Valeri, Diego Chara, and Sebastian Blanco - and, more to the point, the whole damn thing held up in spite of Blanco hitting a couple strokes over par.

I want to pause here to thank Nate Silver for my late, heightened understanding of polls, statistics, and averages. By that I mean, one team having a 4 in 5 chance of winning a game means that the other team has a 1 in 5 chance by translation (association? alchemy? fuck it, I flunked two kinds of math twice). As he explained, that 1 in 5 translates to a 20% chance that something happens, and that’s at least a half dozen steps below rare. I put up a bunch of tweets earlier today outlining why I thought the Timbers had a better than even chance to win tonight (even if I lacked the won-tons to say that outright). God’s honest truth, I’d have put Portland’s chances at 3 in 5 to win, and for all the reasons I noted - e.g., rest, having sharper attacking players than Dallas, and, more than anything else, Dallas being shit in front of goal of late, and against bad teams. Traveling stood as Portland’s biggest handicap, but they goosed the odds on that by, again, resting their best players in the final game of the regular season. And, to answer the question begged in my post on that game, the gamble paid off.

Alphonso Davies 2-1 Portland Timbers: Anatomy of a Gamble with a Big(ass) MLS Playoff Preview

thank you andres flores.

The Portland Timbers tipped their hands when it announced the starting eleven: getting rest for key players like Diegos Valeri and Chara, Sebastian Blanco, uh, Zarek Valentin, Liam Ridgewell, Larrys Mabiala…you should be sensing a pattern by now…probably even Jeremy Ebobisse; at any rate, the Timbers decided three points today mattered less than giving those players and a few more the best chance at being their best possible selves for Wednesday’s first-round playoff game at FC Dallas. (Halloween, guys, really? You’re gonna make fans choose?)

No one will know whether the gamble paid off until the final whistle blows on Halloween, but the Timbers’ understudies couldn’t hold up their end: they lost 2-1 to Alphonso Davies, who got a genuinely nice sending off from teammates and Vancouver Whitecaps fans after turning in a game-winning nearly-90 minutes at BC Place. As Davies sat on the sideline contemplating his personal reality, the TV flashed his career MLS statistics. Eight goals and 12 assists over 65 games. At first blush, you think, huh, thought it’d be higher. Bayern’s Munich’s decision to sign him only adds up when one clocks that Davies produced all of those numbers less one assist in 2018. The way he turned a seam into a tear to score his first goal explains the rest.

Portland's decision to field an army of stand-ins means there’s not a lot to say about this game beyond, guess that’s why they’re not starters. I’ll dig into the numbers down below, but I’m also going to come back later tonight to update this post with a broad-brush look at what the Timbers, and the rest of the teams who made the 2018 MLS Playoffs, look like heading into the post-season. That’ll take some research, but I should send that out into the world by the end of the night. There were some shocks across the league today, seismic, “two in the booter,” and so on.

Back to the Timbers, do I approve of the overall decision to rest, oh, everyone who has reliably proved to be someone this season? Yes, even though it meant Portland (effectively) threw away the chance to catch FC Dallas for the honor of hosting their first round playoff tie. Making that come off would have required a lot of things to go Portland’s way - e.g., Dallas losing at Colorado Rapids (check!) and Portland winning on the road by more than two goals. That’s not some pie-in-the-sky scenario - the Timbers beat RSL by three goals in Utah a few weeks ago - but that also meant giving up something as wholly tangible and valuable as well-rested starters. Add in the fact that Dallas lost its last three games of the season, and that they’d hardly been ruthless before that - 3-4-3 in the last 10 games, and those three wins came against at home against Houston and Orlando, and away to Vancouver - and the entire plan takes a step past safe toward cagey.

Portland Timbers 3-0 Real Salt Lake: Expectations and Getting High on Personnel

Steve! Steve Clark! C'mon, buddy!

My guess is that all the great revelations about the Portland Timbers’ 3-0 home win over Real Salt Lake have already dropped. Given that, I’m going short, laser-focused and bullet-y.

First, and as noted on Friday, I expected the Timbers to win this game with the silent, ass-clenched anxiety of a parent who sets a low bar and expects his (of course, supremely gifted) child to clear it with ease (WHY DO YOU DISAPPOINT ME?!). With that in mind, I went into the game with a general view that, if Portland drew it, I’d worry, and I’d shit my pants a little (just a little) if they lost. Portland cleared the bar, they are playoff-bound, and they could finish as high as…third? Maybe? Unless FC Dallas lets the Colorado Rapids run up the score (HA!), Portland would have to beat the Vancouver Whitecaps by enough goals to erase Dallas two-goal advantage in goal differential. Dallas losing is Step 1 in that process - right along with Portland beating the Vancouver Whitecaps, of which, why not? Vancouver has been bad against good teams at home lately (guess we'll find out, right?) - and, even on the road, a draw feels like the likeliest poor outcome for Dallas, and a draw puts them beyond Portland's reach. Again, that’s against Colorado at home. If Dallas wants to roll into the playoffs with any kind of hope, a draw feels like the most indulgent bar imaginable.

Back to the Timbers, and this game…

Second, watching the first half of this was enough to make me question how this win impressed even the most anxious Timbers fan. RSL looked more interested in a Portland win during the first 20 minutes than Portland did. They didn’t menace for the rest of the 1st half either (Kyle Beckerman's header viscerally excepted) and, again, that was a mystery…until the second half started. Holy shit and thank God for Steve Clark’s positioning/shot-stopping. The list of things for which I thank God involving Clark end there.

Third, thank God Portland got something out of that opening spell. Larrys Mabiala’s 15th minute goal made the later rope-a-dope possible. Even if it wasn't pure rope-a-dope (or rope-a-dope at all), the Timbers needed the breathing room. As for what changed, my first guess is that Mike Petke’s halftime speech was searing and hideously personal. RSL put the Timbers under incredible pressure from the second half whistle to, by my loose estimation, the 65th minute. Anything could have happened over that period, and that should be sobering, and not just in general. RSL is a worse road team than almost all the East (Orlando City clearly excepted, a couple others are close) and only marginally better than all the teams in the Western Conference who stopped mattering a couple weeks ago. Some patterns matter like laws of nature, and that's one of them.

Fourth, the 2nd and 3rd goal explain why RSL is one Los Angeles Galaxy win away from an early off-season (golf, guys, stoned golf). It also makes a case for why Timbers fans shouldn’t get to giddy about the score-line. Portland will not get looks on goal in the playoffs like the one RSL coughed up to Diego Chara, at least not against teams that matter. Just…RSL, on the road, perspective.

FC Cincinnati 1-1 Nashville FC: Hell, Yes, And to Hell with False Narratives

A lie, I tell you. A damned, dirty lie. Either way.

It’s rare that you have to wait that long for at least one person to fuck up during a penalty kick shoot-out, but that was in keeping with the game: tighter than a duck’s ass and, don’t worry, I won’t use that for the image. FC Cincinnati slammed the first decisive kick over the line, and they left tonight with their first playoff win in team history (seriously?). (Also, here's the Match Center for all of the details you want and more!)

Nothing should be taken away from Nashville SC, because they played a hell of a game. They even came damn near to fluking to victory by way of a looping oddball of a goal by Anthony Bourgeois. That erased Corben Bone’s far more attractive (can I call it sexy?) extra-time goal, the one that let me think - no, dream - that this game would end within the time allotted by The Founders (aka, 90 minutes). When the game reached the penalty kick shoot-out and Nashville couldn’t stop scoring…I don’t know. I’d prepared various parts of my body for some kind of inevitable, even if I can’t remember what parts guarded against which event. As one ball followed another into the back of the net and the inevitable drifted into the unimaginable…look, I’m glass half-empty as a motherfucker. I wasn’t expecting the best.

Curiously - or not, honestly - the glass filled over that invisible halfway mark when Kenney Walker stepped to the spot after Nashville’s Justin Davis skied his missed penalty kick into history. I trust Walker to piss ice water, and he did. Moreover, Cincinnati had just survived Forrest Lasso stepping to the spot just one kick before and - won’t lie - that worried me. I can’t explain why, especially when I rate Lasso’s foot-work higher than your average defender’s. Maybe it’s simple as a life-long bias against central defenders in attacking roles that don’t involve their heads. Whatever, I held my breath all the way through his wind-up, hands and arms wrapped around my head to keep…I dunno, something in. The doubts from spreading, maybe?

Seeing a man of technique like Walker stride forward, and a team leader to boot? I’d prepped for him missing but mostly out of respect for The Fates. Of course Kenney Walker buried it, and FC Cincy won the shoot-out, its first playoff win in team history, and the chance to keep dreaming of arriving in Major League Soccer with a trophy in the trunk.

Nashville SC 3-3 FC Cincinnati: Double-Fisted Heartbreak

No actual intention to go political. The rest were about prayer?

The original title for this post was, “The Maddest I’ve Ever Seen Matt Pickens,” so called because FC Cincinnati scored one of those glass-jaw specials that soccer punditry warns you of in every single broadcast immediately after Nashville SC drew the score level at 2-2. Corben Bone got free on Nashville’s right, cut back inside and fired to Pickens’ far side. Shot fired, shit lost, etc. 3-2 to FC Cincy, and in their last road game of 2018.

Cincinnati would feel a similar let-down (and a chink in the armor?) when Bolu Akinboye returned the favor via express service just as regular time drew its last (robust) breath (good game), and this game ended 3-3, and with a world of possibility, good and wish-that-hadn’t-happened for both teams on the field. (See The Match Center for all data.)

On the universal plus-side, both teams will get the chance to do it all over again, only this time in Nippert Stadium/Ohio. With all the points counted and the playoffs set to begin, 1st seed FC Cincy will face 8th seed Nashville in the first round of the USL Eastern Conference Playoffs, the day after tomorrow, effectively, 3 p.m., after school, at the flag-pole and in front of the entire motherfucking school. Place your bets now, and juice-box and orange wedges are your currency, people.

Where to begin? Even getting back to tonight is complicated, and for both teams. On FC Cincy’s side, I was about to say, when was the last time Cincinnati allowed three goals, only to realize that it happened just one month before, and against Toronto FC II. The point is, prior to that, it hadn’t happened since June and…against TFC II. (So, I guess the formula is not playing TFC II?) Another fun fact: that June 3-3 draw against TFC II came only five games into FC Cincinnati’s now-history-making-USL-unbeaten streak and, that lands my point: you’re not used to seeing FC Cincinnati give up three goals in one game because they don’t do it a lot. But they just did it against Nashville, the same team they’ll play in the first round of the playoffs. Sure, that happened in Nashville, but I’m at DEFCON 2, minimum. I mean, dumber things than a first-round flame-out for the regular season champs have happened in the history of sports…

MLS 2018 Week 32 Form Guide ULTRA: Yes, It All Makes Sense

Hallelujah, someone wrote a story from one of my throw-away phrases.

Hail to the God of Viking Viktories! I’ve landed one of these white whales before I turned into an accidental pumpkin! To keep on schedule, we are moving at a fast clip, people. In re structure: I stuck with talking about each game from the relevant week - Week 32, in this case - before turning it over to the Infoboxes (e.g, simple but useful tables) and notes on where every team in Major League Soccer stands after the relevant week - Week 32, in this case, but I repeat myself.

And, before getting to the results, the very simple key goes like this: “IN” teams are the ones either in or reasonably projected to the playoffs, “OUT” is the opposite (bad teams and/or people), while “Marginal” are the teams that float in and out.

As for MLS Week 32, in particular, take away the Vancouver Whitecaps smuggling three points out from Toronto FC’s broken bank, and you’ve got an extraordinarily predictable week. The statements ran from big (Montreal over Columbus), predictable (Dallas over Orlando) to inconsequential (LAFC over Colorado) from there. I’ll expand on all of that immediately below, before closing with my neurosis-laden stab at what it all means. Allons-y.

Montreal Impact 3-0 Columbus Crew SC

I actually sat through 60-ish minutes of this game, but only realized after watching the highlights that it effectively died when Alejandro Silva scored L’Impact’s second goal (the usual suspect delivered as well). Montreal needed it: with DC United beating the Chicago Fire, there does seem to be truth in the argument that Montreal has to win out to survive their bum-rush. Long odds on that, but mission accomplished this week anyway. As for Columbus, they need someone to get started; Justin Meram talked up how ready he was in one of those fawning profiles, but he was subbed off at 70…and with Mike Grella and Patrick Mullins to replace him.

Atlanta United FC 2-1 New England Revolution

On Atlanta’s second goal, you have to look at all the ways that defense could be pulled apart, and despair. New England’s only goal came too late to matter (but it is a subtle thing), which, if you translate that to “the wrong time” gives a rough explanation of the Revs’ season so far. A meaningless game, all things considered, and I expect some carnage from the New England locker room between this season and next, but at least they stopped Josef Martinez from scoring. The big event from this game was Miguel Almiron limpingoff injured. That has more big-shit potential than most injuries.

Pittsburgh Riverhounds 0-0 FC Cincinnati: Poop Just Got Real (and Thank God)

I've been conditioned to this FC Cincy a certain way...

I won’t call it a whole lot of nothing (or even a whole lotta nuthin’). I’ve gotten more pleasure out of scores of games, maybe even several hundreds of them (I’ve been around a bit), but Cincinnati FC’s goal-less draw at the Pittsburgh Riverhounds’ (dinky*) stadium wasn’t paint-drying/grass-growing/old-people-fucking level of torture. At the same time, check The Match Center for highlights, and good luck with it!

(* I’ve had the pleasure of watching U.S. domestic soccer live for over two decades, and I can’t remember the last time I sat in a stadium as small as Highmark Stadium. In its defense, it is only the flip-side of the farce of playing professional soccer at, say, Gillette Stadium.)

In an attempt to explain/analogize to this game through a series of moments, I offer the following:

Pittsburgh’s Neco Brett received a nearly perfect cut-back from a player whose name I don’t recall; he wound up losing track of the ball, allowing his right foot to push it past his (so they tell me) preferred left foot. Minutes later, maybe even as few as one, FC Cincy’s Emery Welshman knocked a loose back pass around Pittsburgh ‘keeper Dan Lynd, only to stumble onto his can at the end of trying to run it down. For the record, neither of these moments show up in The Match Center highlights.

The other moment happened in the second half - somewhere in the 70s, if I had to guess (which I do) - when Cincinnati’s rather large Forrest Lasso tried to shepherd a ball over the goal line with Kay Banjo hanging on his back; Banjo whipped his leg around Lasso’s largeness, nearly creating another chance. This also didn't make the highlights, and that's why I chose them.

Not every shot was terrible - Christiano Francois and Romeo Parkes tormented FC Cincy’s defense in a way I’ve never seen (even at 18 games watched, I consider myself a noob), and both Emanuel Ledesma and Fatai Alashe put solid shots on goal (and all those made the highlights) - but that this game didn’t see many good chances. The detail I flagged with Banjo is meant to draw out the idea that Pittsburgh played the better game, thereby surprising FC Cincinnati, thereby perhaps reminding them that things only get harder for the rest of the season and (are you paying attention??) into some indefinite future given the path this young team has chosen.

By way of translating reality to numbers, the best stat I can provide for Pittsburgh’s visible edge in this game would be shots, general: the Riverhounds had 18 to Cincinnati’s four. Credit Pittsburgh for being the team most likely to; credit Cincinnati for making them the team that never did - even if with moments of doubt (e.g., Lasso having to pull Brett’s jersey at 34(ish) or Hoyte flirting with an own-goal when Francois broke through (yet again) down Pittsburgh’s left in the second half). I can’t think of any way in which Pittsburgh wasn’t the better team yesterday, and that runs counter to normal for someone who, like me, still has yet to see FC Cincinnati lose.

Real Salt Lake 1-4 Portland Timbers: Chekhov's Axe

I worry sometimes, perhaps more than I should.

The Portland Timbers rolled into Sandy, Utah last night “needing a result” against Real Salt Lake, if in some non-specific sense. To give a tautly symbolic answer for what they wound up getting, I give you Lucas Melano’s first goal of 2018, and Portland’s fourth of the game. After playing something like even for 70 minutes, RSL either fell apart or the Timbers tore them apart - and in Sandy, too, a rare feat in 2018 - on the way to a 4-1 win that arrived late, but with gusto.

It was a strange game, honestly. Portland could barely connect more than three passes in the opening 10-15 minutes - and not by anything RSL was doing, but by just giving away the ball. It took them some time to knock that shit off and, even when they managed it long enough to create Jeremy Ebobisse’s game-opening goal, the quality and composure of their work came in and out like a series of cameos. If you watched the first 70 minutes of this game with your heart beating green and gold, you never stopped checking over your shoulder for the inevitable falling axe (you know that thing, where they show you a gun at the beginning of a play?). I can speak only for myself, but I didn’t stop checking my 5 and 7 for that axe, even after Sebastian Blanco put Portland up 2-1 with some strapping thievery. That lingering paranoia would last took three, maybe four minutes more when Blanco buried the game with his second goal of the game, and the Timbers’ third.

I became a contented puddle after that unswaddled miracle. Once it became clear that the Timbers could fuck up without fucking up the game? Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, etc. After a long day of watching my country self-immolate, this was very, very welcome. It was nice to have an uncomplicated, happy emotion for a few.

Portland built its win on all those goals (if with a dash of slam-dunk (e.g., Melano’s goal)), but, around half time, I noticed something that I wasn’t seeing: looks at goal for RSL, never mind any good ones. RSL scored, obviously, and through a slightly enormous seam left open when the Timbers’ got wrapped up in defending a cross that never came, but they didn’t get too many shots in the end (nine total; numbers mean something when they match what you see). As I review the game in my mind, it feels like Portland’s midfield - ft. Mssrs. Chara and Guzman - managed the game as much as anyone else out there; I don’t recall heroics from this or that defender and Steve Clark didn’t have much to do in goal either. Portland kept RSL away from goal, basically, and for most of the game. The reality is, the Timbers managed the Hell out of this game. As much as that’s obvious in retrospect, I really never did stop checking for that axe. How many dumb/sloppy/clumsy goals have the Timbers allowed this season? No idea, and it doesn’t matter; what matters is the extent to which I’ve internalized that as “a thing,” something that just happens because bad things happen to good people. Or just Julio Cascante. When he came on, I could have sworn I saw a red dot on his back...

MLS Week 32 Preview: Stakes, and How Much They Matter

Fun image. Older image (look who's missing).

As I look over the match-ups for Major League Soccer’s Week 32, I’m seeing a good number of games that matter, but fewer games that I have any reason to expect to be good. To put a sharper edge on that, few of these results will be important, at least beyond the hopes and dreams of the local fan base. Here’s a compare/contrast that makes the point: Real Salt Lake v. Portland Timbers involves two teams with something to play for, and, even if neither team plays all that well, the stakes will make every kick, no matter how unfortunate, matter a little more, and all those things make this a good game simply because it exists; by way of contrast – and I’ve got several options, so let’s go with… - FC Dallas v. Orlando requires the result itself to be of any interest to anyone outside the Dallas metro area and (or, given where they play) its exurbs. For anyone wondering, yes, I omitted Orlando from the locus of locations that give a rat’s ass about this result.

All in all, I put the total number of games that match RSL v. Portland (i.e., “good because it’s important”) at three of Week 32’s 11 games; Toronto FC v. Vancouver Whitecaps makes a quiet case for bumping that up to four games, but another, more persuasive case exists for treating both teams’ hopes for the playoffs like Canada’s chances for reaching the World Cup. Appropriately.

In the rest of this post I’ll briefly preview all of Week 32’s games –RSL v. Portland gets a little extra and goes first, because, fan! I’ll direct most of the notes to expectations, as opposed to questions of tactics, “hot” players (play, not looks, except where noted), or other granular things that I don’t really know about. I pull these assumptions out of two places: 1) the rolling monument to my neuroses that I call The Form Guide ULTRA (Week 31's), and 2) my ass. Moving on…

If you’re a Portland Timbers fan, you should be worried about their chances away to RSL on Saturday – and mostly because RSL holds most of the cards, if not all of them. That’s not a call for panic – four points separate the Timbers from the abyss, after all, and the chasing Los Angeles Galaxy has its own Death Race 2000 to run (see below) – but the track records for both teams, both season-long and current, lean in RSL’s favor. “Tilt” is the correct verb, because this isn’t toddler versus dumptruck: in terms of patterns, this pits 3-5-2 in their last 10 games for Portland, against 4-2-4 for RSL; and impressive as RSL’s nearly 2.0 goals per game over that same period looks, their 19 goals for over that period get massive padding from their back-to-back six-goal games against the Colorado Rapids away and the Galaxy at home. That doesn’t make those results any less impressive (or timely), but wisdom points to treating outliers as such when you play with numbers.

MLS Week 31 Form Guide ULTRA: New Week, Good One, Too, New Format; Same Tables

This guy's fault. (Also, real good live performer.)

Because I’m on short time this week (saw The Jesus Lizard on Saturday, interested parties better get to ‘em before David Yow keels over on stage), it’s going to take more of this week than I want to organize a Top 5 talking points to kick off this ride through Data Hell (see the “InfoBoxes” below). Then again, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. I’m not really equipped to give detailed analysis – look below, you’ll see it’s mostly numbers I’m relying on – so, I’m going to try linking to the scores/match recap pages and flagging points of interest in the highlights and other data sets for each game. [Ed. – I’m only giving one link to each game; if you want to see what I’m talking about, you’ll have to do some poking around.] If nothing else, that matches with my actual knowledge of what’s going around MLS.

So, yeah, that’s your basic structure – notes on games, then InfoBoxes. To explain the latter, those are simple tables, one for each team in MLS, that talks about where each of them are after the week in question (e.g., Week 31). Those tables show how all the teams in MLS did over their last 10 games, against who (whom?), and in whose house. And, to provide a key for some terminology, “IN” teams are the ones projected for (or, now, already in the playoffs), “OUT” teams are the ones who, according to appearances and the numbers, look dead; finally, there are the teams who could still go either way, and I call them “Marginal.” I’ll have to work out where to put information between the notes on the games and the notes with the InfoBoxes, but I’ll try to keep repetition at a minimum.

All in all, I’m less surprised by what I see every week, and that makes me think there’s some value in all this. Call it a good guide to MLS, but hardly an infallible one. Anyhoo, let’s start with all the games in MLS Week 31. Links to the recap are in the scores. You see 'em, right?

New York City FC 2-0 Chicago Fire

The box score hints that this was the massacre it looked like. David Villa scored a beauty for NYC’s second, and on top of setting up NYC’s first goal with a half-blind backheel (he knew someone was back there). Going the other way, Villa’s goal was like a live re-enactment of why the Fire’s season sucks so bad.

Houston Dynamo 3-0 Philadelphia Union (U.S. Open Cup)

I won’t usually bring U.S. Open Cup results into these weekly reviews, but, holy shit, did Houston need a bright spot this season. Also, how can anyone be against DaMarcus Beasley winning a trophy for the long road ahead? This had highlights and lowlights - Mauro Manotas’ slicing sprint through Philly’s flank and Aaron Trusty fucking burying an own goal, respectively.

Portland Timbers 0-0 FC Dallas: A Time to Take Chances

Just because it feels good, doesn't mean it's right.

I’m not sure where to start this post, so I’ll start with Jeff Attinella. Seeing him go down twisted the knot in my stomach a little tighter for the Portland Timbers’ slide down the shute of the 2018 inevitable end-run. It’s not that I think Steve Clark isn’t a good goalkeeper, than I think Attinella is a better ‘keeper. And with the Portland Timbers teetering on the edge of a margin, this team needs every advantage it can get. I don’t know a thing about the recovery time for separating shoulders (it happened a second time, and during the game, right?), but I’d rather have one steady ‘keeper back there, than have a guy start, then try to keep a semi-meaningless ball from rolling off the field, and then, after two-three arduous minutes, get his arm back in place only to have pop out again.

Look, I’m slapping the turf with Jeff Attinella, not at Jeff Attinella. Bottom line, while I might think Attinella is a better ‘keeper, I’m also at a place where I want the best possible, consistently fieldable iteration of the Portland Timbers on the field every week until their whole goddamn season ends - even if that means starting Clark (the fuck you mean “fieldable” isn't a word?).

That said, minus one highly relevant player (see: Blanco, Sebastian), the Timbers fielded its A-team tonight and…look, it’ll take a miracle for this team to do anything serious in 2018. I took a handful of pros and cons away from this game, but the overarching marker for Portland tops out at “good.” A team with any worthwhile mojo wins a game like this - i.e., if they can’t break down one of the top teams in the league with Plan A, they can put a call in to Plan B and get a result or rescue a draw. Generally speaking - and this game coughed up more than the usual number of “yes, buts” - the Timbers aren’t built to do that. That Blanco was missing didn’t help, but, on the evidence, his presence hasn’t been make or break for Portland this season, even as he makes the team usefully better.

At the same time, what goes for Portland applies to Dallas: they’re more or less a solid defensive team with a handful of useful means to get to goal and, Lord willing, score them. Overall, Dallas is every bit as unremarkable as the Timbers - i.e., their results don’t catch the eye, and they’ve lately relied on certain, specific people (in their case, Michael Barrios) to keep them in the running. Close observers of the Portland Timbers should find that both accurate, and a little sad, because, no matter how you arrange the letters, none of what happened tonight, and for either team, spells “G-L-O-R-Y.” Call last night’s 0-0 draw a blown opportunity for both teams, and, holy shit, is that really the first time I mentioned the score?

FC Cincinnati 3-0 Indy Eleven: Fat and Happy in the Lap of Luxury

Loving cradling our collective asses...is it good for you?

FC Cincinnati rotated its squad - more than a little, too - and they still comfortably outplayed visiting Indy Eleven, 3-1. Hey…I lead with the score. (And here’s The Match Center for all the numbers and videos you’re going to get on this game.)

The machinery didn’t run without friction, some portions of it more manifest than others - e.g., Indy made Cincy ‘keeper Evan Newton stretch for a couple shots, and, when Pa Konate came off the field at 53’, nothing about that substitution made me scratch my head - but it never felt like Indy’s game to win. And that makes the numbers from the match curious reading - especially the figures for attack and distribution. A couple testaments to the gap between the game I thought I saw and those numbers lurk on my twitter feed (@JeffBull5), but, who is to say what is real in paranoid times? Who’s to say that some miscreant statistician within the secret sanctums of the USL FO didn’t replace the actual numbers from this game in an attempt to hide FC Cincinnati’s true greatness? No, I can’t prove it, but you can’t not prove it either. (CITIZENS: Keep your eye on the Orange and Blue’s record, watch for skullduggery! Eternal vigilance!!)

(Speaking of conspiracies, did that Cincinnati’s Matt Bahner get away with a goal-line handball early in the second half? And what to make of the Zapruder-esque quality on those replays? Wait...can someone make a basement disappear with the push of a button?)

Whatever the numbers say, Cincy created better openings, some of them boulevard-wide - e.g., when the wonderful work down Indy’s right by Michael Lahoud and Jimmy McLaughlin so mesmerized the defense that they gave Fanendo Adi a public-park’s worth of free acreage. McLaughlin would strike again later, and with a ball over the top to a surging Danni Konig that I didn’t credit enough when I watched it live. Then again, for all the good work by McLaughlin and Konig, the latter couldn’t have finished that chance without a blundering assist by Indy’s ‘keeper, Owain Fon Williams, and two of his defenders. Indy’s defense would cough up yet another mistake when Carlyle Mitchell pinged a (good) Russell Cicerone cross into his own team’s side netting…hell, maybe there is no need for a conspiracy to explain this result.

MLS Week 31 Preview: The Battle for the East

Dreamin'.....

And so the calendar rolls into MLS Week 31…more or less. As with most things, MLS refuses to measure/organize the progression of its season in keeping with real-world practices. I wanted to briefly preview – or, better, frame – this weekend’s games. Because the whole thing about a dogfight in Gresham versus a revolution in China, I’m going to start local.

The Portland Timbers host FC Dallas this Saturday and, as noted in last week’s Form Guide ULTRA, this game ranks pretty highly in my personal order of importance (here, for easier checking on the notes below, is the official Form Guide). It’s a home game, of course, – and that matters with only two left – but a win here offers real, potentially enduring positives. Beating The Cream of the Western Conference (well, this week) will puff some wind in our sails and (big stretch!), who knows? Maybe the confidence will carry Portland an extra step when it counts. More than that, though, a win here sends the Timbers into the rest of its regular season with some a little more padding. Y’know, for safety? So…what are the chances?

While Dallas is hardly on fire (4-3-3), Portland’s ass keeps bumping the ground lately. Sure, the team has been perfect at home over its last 10 games (3 wins!), but those are, 1) the only three wins over that time, and 2) those came against Toronto FC, the Colorado Rapids and (better) Columbus Crew SC. Further complicating matters, Sebastian Blanco (aka, One-Man, Two-Way Kickass Squad) is suspended for the occasion; there are no other significant, or at least not surprising, absences for either team. Having suffered a choking period of their own, Dallas isn’t exactly flying into this game, but they’re comfortably in the top half of defense teams – not great for Portland’s fitful (now Blanco-less) attack – and Dallas transition very quickly, often isolating fullbacks in particular with the kind of long balls that stretch defenses. Oh, and they’re not slouches on set-pieces either. All in all…sigh. For what it’s worth, I think Portland can get all three points…it’s just that I think a draw, goal-less or otherwise, feels more likely.

If Maximiliano Urruti who shivs us…love the guy, but…damn. Just damn. OK, on to the rest of ‘em!

After looking at the weekend’s match-ups, I decided to call Week 31 The Battle for the East. That’s no exaggeration (well, outside being an actual exaggeration), because three games have potential to move things in significant directions. [Ed. - Obviously, all this comes in the context of a league that enforces both parity and an aggressively generous playoff system - i.e., to miss the playoffs is to fuck up enough to disappoint your dad, and have two of his friends mock him. Your mom will always be there for you, pumpkin.] To take them in no particular turn:

MLS Week 30 Form Guide ULTRA: Best Weeks, Worst Weeks and Tripping on the Cellar Stairs

Very, very, very fast walking! YEAH! HELL, YEAH!!!

[Ed. - This post is like an iceberg - most of it lurks down in the InfoBoxes below  - aka, fairly basic tables that show the last 10 results for each team in Major League Soccer, including who they played, where, and the quality of the opposition. I divide quality by: “IN,” teams in the playoffs, or projected to get there; “OUT,” means any team caught between doom and disarray, while “Marginal” teams serially straddle the playoff line.]

I’ll get to Week 30’s Top 5 moments, but I’d also like to call for a moment of silence to commemorate the week’s saddest, loneliest, least cared-for game. Orlando City SC met the Houston Dynamo on Saturday with nothing but pride and some hints of better times ahead on the line. The game ended 0-0. 3...2...1...shh…[quiet sobs, some laughter. and scene.]

Moving on.

Chocolate Mudslide to the Shield

Unless a miracle in the Western Conference meets a total collapse at the top of the Eastern Conference, the only two teams in MLS with a real shot at the Supporters’ Shield are the New York Red Bulls and Atlanta United FC. Both teams won during Week 30: Atlanta twice (a 3-4 thriller at San Jose (which included a solid candidate for GOTW), followed by a 2-0 win over Real Salt Lake), while New York might have taken too long (and it needed this one-man debacle to pad the final score to 2-0). The plot thickens next week when those same two teams meet next Sunday, but it thins out quite a bit for the rest of the season. The only really tough game left for either team is the Philadelphia Union at home - that’s New York’s and, between that and New York already being 4 points below them, that makes the Shield Atlanta’s to lose. New York gets the game at home, but it’s not like Atlanta is bad on the road (try 10-3-2). At the same time, the comparatively soft schedule for both teams means neutrals have to squeeze all the glory of this race into next Sunday. I expect all the excitement of speed-walking for the rest.

Philadelphia Has the Best Week Ever

It’s worth taking time to linger on what the Union did, not just this past weekend, but recently. That they knocked off two off two of the Western Conference’s hottest teams - the Seattle Sounders (1-0) and Sporting Kansas City (2-0), and they played the former in Seattle - only begins the story of how fast and smoothly Philly’s phinest are rolling. Not even going 7-2-1 over their last 10 contains everything about the team’s momentum. They played six of those 10 games on the road and they went 4-1-1 in those games - a number that’s doubly-impressive when set beside the Union’s 6-7-2 road record overall. This team is correcting, powerfully, and at the best possible time. Better yet, they finally found reliable scoring (that said, Jay Simpson scoring two isn’t the normal course of things).