MLS Week 4 Preview (I Got Curious) (ft. Chicago Fire v. Portland Timbers)

We all have this moment.

The bug that crawled up my butt (and took over my brain) has the crazy urge to glance at the weekend ahead in Major League Soccer - particularly, what ins & out I can manage with the Portland Timber’s visit to The Big Wind (Chicago). While I’ll start by previewing the Portland’s game, this post has just as much to do with taking some time to perform a little due diligence on the rest of the league - especially now that MLS has yanked our methadone (i.e., real condensed games, not that median-five-minute bullshit). So, I’ll read all those editions of The Kick Off I can’t find time to read all week (because I am a rat addicted to the “rage pellets” of political commentary), and we’ll see what comes out of that.

But first…

Chicago Fire v. Portland Timbers

(Official MLS preview)

First, I didn’t know the Timbers have history on their side for this game - as in the Fire has never so much as singed the Portland Timbers, never mind burned them. Probably doesn’t hurt that Chicago has struggled for almost as long as Portland has been in MLS. They’re also struggling this season: they’ve lost at home, on the road in a shoot-out, and to a barely-revamped Minnesota United FC (yikes!). Who else is also struggling? That’s right! The Timbers are struggling! Not as hard as Liam Ridgewell (who might be consoling himself in a room full of trampolines as any man would), but Portland also has yet to win, they’ve suffered a bigger hurt, but, on the plus side, the Timbers drew a game. And how you feel about that probably grows a little from how you feel about FC Dallas (Stumptown Footy’s Chris Rifer called Dallas “their most difficult of the season-opening five-game road trip,” but I don’t think Dallas has recovered from their shattering 2017), and a handful of other relevant factors. In no particular order:

1) Formationz in Flux

If my wrap-up of last week’s game had a unifying point - or two - it was that Portland’s coach, Giovanni Savarese lined up defensive - and also that I don’t think he has much choice on that, at least not for now. Because I start from there, it was interesting to read this passage from C. I. DeMann’s wrap-up of the same game:

“Three games into Gio Savarese’s reign, I’m finding it incredibly difficult to predict starters. And you know what? Maybe this is a good thing. Or, at least, not a bad thing.”

According to MLS’s preview, David Guzman returns from international duty this weekend and, with Lawrence “I Can Reach It!” Olum out, the Timbers need him. While all kinds of tinkering is possible, I’m putting money on the same formation with maybe some tweaks in personnel - say, Samuel Armenteros starting over Fanendo Adi. And that’s where it gets weird…or at least where opinions diverge.

MLS 2018 Diary, (Calendar, MFs!) Week 4: Announcements of Intent and Injury

That's a "harley davidson riding for glory."

Even in this (blissfully) short MLS “Week” - pretty sure it’s Week 4 (and this site is going strictly calendar week till season’s end; I couldn’t give fewer fucks about your team's games in hand….hold on) - I see signs of X, Y and Z, where X = a couple teams rather saucily announcing themselves, Y = injuries killing a team here, hobbling a team there, and Z = an abrupt fascination with the formation/personnel mix. I went into that last one with the one team I know well enough to speak to - the not-yet mighty Portland Timbers (who might need a rain-check on mightiness till 2019) - but that’s the way I hope to understand any teams as possible in this league by the end of the season.

To give an example, the Timbers (allegedly) lined up in a Christmas tree, which translates to 7 guys in something perilously close to a defensive posture. That shift made all kinds of sense given Portland’s first two games of the season - i.e., 180 minutes of neither attacking nor defending well - so why not pile up the human shields and defend the goal first, second and third? On the other hand, that’s hardly the Harley-D one rides to glory, at least not without apologizing for the poor taste. More to the point, it makes all kinds of sense given the Timbers’ personnel. I expect Diego Chara’s return to bring more stability to….just everything (but there are no guarantees), so, with the team struggling to reliably generate offense - and with reliable offense getting harder to imagine with each passing week - that calls for playing the personnel you have in the formation/personnel alignment most likely to gain a result of any kind, even if it means playing...unattractively [imagine the sound of a child sobbing in the night].

Easy as that is on paper, the real question about playing defensive is when a coach is just being a chicken shit. Speaking of, know who doesn’t have one single ounce of chicken-shit in him? Jesse Marsch. If that guy unlocked the code to MLS, by which I mean the lowest-risk domestic treble - and the potential looks like it's there, if only for a year or two - all future coaches of the next…let’s call it 10 years will be in his debt. The guy that draws the map. The guy that draws the map. (Repetition for effect. Stay with me.)

For all that, Portland got its best result of 2018 Saturday against FC Dallas (link above…under "I expect"), which kind of sells me on starting from a defensive posture till something better comes along - then again, see above notes on “chicken-shittedness.” To loop in the Los Angeles Galaxy, they’re facing the same problem, if on some slightly askew, yet parallel plane. This weekend saw them arrive in Vancouver without their two attacking mainstays in Nicolas Alessandrini and Giovanni dos Santos. Even if Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s arrival ushers in dos Santos’ exit (um…), the Galaxy still have to bridge the time before Zlatan shows up, so injuries matter. They matter all the time, of course, but for more teams more than others - apparently, at least.

I’ll walk through the rest of this week’s games from here, with more emphasis on New England v. New York City FC and Colorado Rapids v. Sporting Kansas City, because those are the two games I watched all the way through (apart from Dallas v. Portland). That said, there’s an interesting theory or two getting tested this season, so pay attention.

FC Dallas 1-1 Portland Timbers: Dancin’ with the One That Brung You

Delighted to have found this searching for "crippling brain-fart."

Had Sebastian Blanco failed to score his impressive goal (which I missed in real-time; Taco Bell run…for some damn reason), Portland Timbers fans would have little to hold onto on the attacking side of the game besides Alvas Powell making a series of bad decisions, before making his one clear good one - e.g., his late shot on goal. And even that decision only looked “good” due to Powell having better control of the ball and his body than he did on any of his other misfiring forays up field. He made a similar, clumsier run earlier and took a shot from the tough angle and he lost good runs by Fanendo Adi in both cases…thus we draw yet another line that divides good decisions from a bad ones.

I’d file Diego Valeri hitting a shot in frustration from over 30 yards out in the same binder: whatever it suffers on the decision side, it gains from winding up as a decent shot. Still, he scores that one time in 30 attempts, and that begs the question.

Blanco buried his goal, of course, and that lead to the fairer result because, all things considered, the 1-1 draw it ended in feels better for this game than a Dallas win would have. There, it’s worth considering whether another referee would have called a penalty kick on Cristhian Paredes’ late hand-ball in the Timbers area. (Was it a handball? I don’t recall at the moment who noted the ever-increasing complexity of what does and doesn’t constitute a handball in MLS at this point, but I am, and will always remain, a fan of the “porn” definition of a handball - e.g., I know it when I see it. To answer the question, yes, I would have called that one on the grounds that who knew where the cross would have traveled had Paredes’ arm not knocked it down. Call it the “trajectory theory” of handball.)

Regardless, I raise that point to raise the issue of thin margins. Because neither team could put away this game, never mind squeeze the proverbial last hand on the bat for dominance, this game hung forever in the absence a moment of brilliance and/or a crippling brain-fart (hmm….maybe that’s the inspiration for the image?). Both teams had singular moments of brilliance - e.g., Dallas’ Jacori Hayes sending Portland’s defense and midfield into retreat by running at them before dishing to Roland Lamah for the cool finish; Portland, meanwhile, answered with Blanco’s goal. Besides that, the game was just so much running around.

Truth be told, I’m pretty happy about that. Portland looked quite a bit better moving the ball forward in this outing than they have all season. Some as yet unmeasured part of me wonders about the extent Dallas allowed that; as noted in the preview I slipped into this post, I figured Dallas would leave space in the channels near the top of the attacking third for Valeri and Blanco to operate in, and they did (and, to empathize a little, I’d be shitting myself if I were a Dallas fan). I haven’t looked at the boxscore - and probably won’t till I wrap up the rest of this weekend’s (blessedly sparse) games, but I doubt Portland generated a ton of shots. Then again, Dallas didn’t either and, in the context of the 2018 season so far, that spells less relief than release - i.e., on par with coming out on the other side of a crippling bout of “stomach flu.”

MLS 2018 Diary, Week 3: Signals True and False

Nothing to see here. Go about your business.

Welcome to this recap of Major League Soccer Week 3 - and do cherish these early days when the schedule draws bald, strong lines between one Week and the next. As with the clock ticking up to closing time, things get blurry later.

Speaking of blurry, I have strong doubts that the standings will look the same at season’s end than they do today. As much as I try not to lean too far over the skis - especially now that I’m working with less direct observation - I feel pretty confident in predicting that neither Toronto FC, nor the Seattle Sounder and the Portland Timbers will end 2018 hanging off the bottom of the table; on the other side of the same token, I don’t expect Minnesota United FC to finish 2nd in the Western Conference and I do expect that Philadelphia won’t hold onto 3rd in the Eastern - and I say that as someone who’s thrilled to see teams like that where they are, even as I believe both teams read like someone who believes he’s ready for the pro circuit after winning his first three hands of Texas Hold ‘Em.

It was a pretty good weekend all in all, even for being Portland-Timberless - although, let the record show that my unconscious mind guided me toward a means to let the Timbers crash this post - in that not a lot of teams and situations feel settled after Week 3. I’ll get to individual results and comments thereon - and the stuff about Portland - but I want to continue by filling in the outline above and painting sort of an statistical, impressionist portrait of the week just past.

I’ll start with a word on methodology. I watched three games this weekend: Atlanta United FC’s 4-1 romp over the Vancouver Whitecaps, Real Salt Lake’s generally fortuitous 1-0 win over the New York Red Bulls, and FC Dallas’ long-handed ‘n’ languid 3-0 walk over the Seattle Sounders (links to recaps down below). Your first take-away from that is that I know those games better than the rest, but, as every modifier in the sub-clause of that sentence suggests (because what do I know about, say, Dallas after watching for just one 90-minute game?), I have every intention of drawing inferences from whatever data points I have on hand, and I’m not sure it’s going to be any worse.

To illustrate the above, allow me to draw broad preliminary examples from this week’s games: for instance, I think Toronto reads as having enough faith in what they’ve got to the point of perhaps asking too much of them - see, who they started against Montreal. The Red Bulls, meanwhile, look like they’re building the squad rotator’s dream. It’s a choice of thinking your players can handle the rigors and still win it all (Toronto) versus a plan to optimize a long-haul season, while knowing that might entail a slip or two (New York, whose squad rotation worked against Portland, but not RSL…sort of). The Sounders, on the other, other hand, might be pushing too many ingredients past their expiration date to succeed in most things this year.

MLS 2018 Diary, Week 2: We've Got Budding Storylines, People!

Spotting good pedigree isn't always complicated.

I decided to do a stand-alone summary for each week of Major League Soccer action. That’s instead of lumping that in with the review of Portland’s (frankly eye-burning) loss. I’ll go deeper on two games each week - ideally, at least - and give thumbnail impressions for the other ones. If I update either post as the week goes on, it’ll be this one.

And so, with zero claims toward expertise and exhaustive knowledge, here’s how The World of Major League looked this week.

Columbus Crew SC 3-2 Montreal Impact

Crew SC opened some eyes when they opened the season with a road win over defending champs Toronto FC, so I contradicted my own tweets to watch them instead of the Colorado Rapids’ visit to New England. Columbus even started off against Montreal the same way they did against Toronto - i.e., with two early goals nearly back-to-back. Even as they threatened to run up the score, Columbus left fairly glaring gaps all over the field for the Impact to exploit; by the second half, Daniel Lovitz and Ignacio Piatti (who pulled a sleeping dog act through the first half), in particular, dismantled Columbus’ defense from Montreal’s right. The Impact clawed all the way back in right before the final whistle (hell of a goal from Raheem Edwards, too)…only to cough up a late, late (and sadly justified) penalty kick that Gyasi Zardes slammed into the right side of the goal’s roof.

It’ll be interesting to see the reads on this game, because Montreal looked the stronger team; they almost rescued a draw in their road opener against the Vancouver Whitecaps (of whom, see below), but they didn’t and they’re stalled out at zero points for the season and a -2 goal differential. They still have dangerous players - Piatti, obviously, but also Matteo Mancosu - but they also have issues from getting players like Jeisson Vargas and Saphir Taider into useful roles in the team (Taider, especially, played under his pedigree) to having a few players who look a couple steps off Broadway (Michael Petrasso and Samuel Piette). As for Columbus, if yesterday gave an accurate display of their team defense, I’d be as worried about that as a Crew fan as I’d be about the team moving. On the plus side, they look like they have a plan in the attack, and their engine, Federico Higuain, looks like he’s got plenty of miles left. More than anything else, both teams look interesting and show real potential, both for effectiveness and decent entertainment.

OK, that’s that game. I’ll wrap up one more (probably tomorrow) and tuck that on the end of this post as an update, but, barring inspiration, that’s as deep as I intend to go on those. As for the rest of this weekend’s games, here are a handful of thumbnail notes and takes both hot and cold.

Also…c’mon, MLS. The six-minute condensed game? When the highlight reel takes just two minutes less? Guys…

New York Red Bulls 4-0 Portland Timbers:The Slough of Despond, But With a View!

Think this might be familiar this season.

What do you call a game that had nothing?

Some mysteries have no answers....holy shit, some mysteries have no answers.

My top-line thought on the New York Red Bulls’ 4-0 pool-shark evisceration of the Portland Timbers was…well, brutal. Portland has regressed, and abruptly. Ideally, this is a bad spell that will pass once new coach, Giovanni Savarese, figures out where he wants to take the whole thing and he's just keeping things status quo (same formation, and relying on most of the same players, etc.) in the meantime. At time of writing, though, Timbers fans have an absolutely stunning view of the Slough of Despond.

Because this post only continues the evisceration, I want to state this early: this isn’t hitting the panic button. Portland hasn’t been good on the road since 2015 (though they held up decently in 2017), so I didn’t expect much from the opening stanza of 2018, most of which the team will sing on the road. Something else I didn’t expect: a Portland team that looks, for all the world, like it has no clear sense of how to move the ball forward, never mind be goal-dangerous, a team that looks utterly fucking clueless in the attack. It’s important to stick with that idea about the same players in the same formation because the bulk of this same team didn’t just win the Western Conference last season, it featured the league’s most valuable player, Diego Valeri MVP, and looked like it had several ideas on how to score.

Between preseason and season, I haven’t seen Valeri feature in anything for Portland so far. Worse, every other player looks to have dropped off the same cliff. And that’s the real mystery: how does a team that basically knew what to do in the attack last season transform into eleven stumbling blind mice? I mean, sure, night follows day, but rarely that fast.

That aside, Portland’s starters punched even with New York’s reserves tonight (again, the reserves.) The Timbers “came back into the game” in the early part of the second half, but still without quite knowing what to do fully in play. Luis Robles, Jr. had to stop one chance (v. Samuel Armenteros) and steal another (header by Dairon Asprilla), but those two shots bounced against Portland’s ceiling, while the Red Bulls, on the other hand, left Portland chasing on the game winner, playing in, out, around, then across Portland’s defensive middle to score a tap-in. The Timbers defense flat-out sucked for the second week running, so it’s not a huge surprise to see them struggle against an accomplished forward like Bradley Wright-Phillips; the 17-year-old, on the other hand, Ben Mines, the guy who scored the goal documented above…yeah, that’s a blow.

Los Angeles Galaxy 1-2 Portland Timbers: We Have Our (or Some) Dignity

The right kind of vulnerable.

To begin at the actual beginning, I’ll have to switch up a thing or two about “My Process” in the post-condensed-game MLSLive era. The only way I can dial back in to pick up more detail is to watch the entire game all over and again, and no. With that in mind, this week will take a high angle view of the situation that is, at this point in time, by no means perilous.

And that’s the top-line question about the Portland Timbers’ 1-2 road loss to the Los Angeles Galaxy already answered: am I happy with it? Tentatively, and on the level that I didn’t expect any different. Also, the team caught a break in that they didn’t melt into a putrescent puddle after giving up a second goal to the Galaxy. The Timbers stumbled to the edge of the abyss Atlanta United FC visited in their opening loss, but didn’t fall in. And that’s not so bad after a bad performance.

Put that in the context of how much one (maybe two) pundit(s) hyped the Galaxy heading into 2018, and given that big goddamn field - which, as I failed to adequately explain to the people I watched the game with last night, takes Portland out of their element like few fields in MLS - this made for a gutsy start to the Timbers’ 2018. And I say that as someone who, at this point, ranks winning the Supporters’ Shield over all trophies. Face it, MLS Cup is just having a go at the leftovers excellence leaves behind…

My neuroses - or just that specific set of neuroses - can wait for a bit because I want to, 1) get back to the game, and 2) talk more about how I see the Portland Timbers’ 2018. Also, 2)(a) I want to talk about what I see doing with posts like these for the season. With that, let’s start with 2)(a).

With this 2018 Major League Soccer season, my plan is to start with a post about what just happened with the Portland Timbers during and after any game they play (except, say, U.S. Open Cup, which I couldn’t care less about, and the powers that be have only themselves to blame for that). I want those up on Sunday night in the future (ideally), but the plan is to update the same post with anything worthwhile I stumble across on MLSSoccer.com throughout the week. What this should produce is a standard, evolving Portland Timbers/MLS post for each week of the season (when I’m not on vacation, because I’ll totally be on vacation later this year). In a perfect world, this’ll involve just adding touches to the Timbers material, while actually filling in the blanks on notable news from the rest of MLS (i.e., the Houston Dynamo dropping four pieces of unanswered hurt on Atlanta United FC, which supports a personal theory that they’re short on defense). This is idea without action so far, but it feels really, really promising conceptually, so just pretend it happened and was wildly successful (PLEASE!!??).