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.

The Timbers also never really managed New York’s press. When Liam Ridgewell and Larrys Mabiala weren’t coughing up the ball, David Guzman picked up that particular piece of odious slack. Those "momentary losses of muscular coordination” kept Portland’s defense on the back-foot and, from tonight, that’s not their best place. Both central defenders lacked the required focus (Mabiala, whose best moment might have been the yellow card he picked up; at least that was professional) and intensity (hello, jogging Ridgewell on New York's first goal and…whichever one he totally didn’t follow New York’s Carlos Rivas to the spot where the latter scored on (again) a tap-in; might have been third or fourth). Broadly, though, when the breaks came they were fatal.

And I guess that’s the really depressing thing: when just some of New York’s starters came on, Portland collapsed into a puddle and that turned a close loss where New York did everything just a little bit better turned into the rout we witnessed. Maybe New York will just kick ass this season - MLS teams literally don’t go to Mexico and get results because they haven’t, but New York picked up the third MLS-CCL win ever in Tijuana, and was the first MLS team to win a game in Mexico by more than one goal - and Portland’s just an early victim. Small consolation...

On a related note, I watched Columbus Crew SC v. Montreal Impact earlier today (more later) and Montreal slots into the same dismal two-loss hole as Portland, but the Impact genuinely should have drawn the Crew today and I heard they came close against the Vancouver Whitecaps in Week 1. Montreal presents as a team with upside right now while the Timbers look wholly deserving of their table-bottoming state. New York destroyed them in the end. And, honestly, it only gets worse when you look at the age of the players on each team’s roster. One of these teams is building for the future…and it's not Portland.

Worse still, where do you see Portland finding viable options? To make that specific, outside the tight starters' race between Armenteros and Fanend Adi, where do you see Portland unearthing a savior on the current roster? What player hasn’t the coaching staff tried who could make this team better during 2018 - or, better, which players will fit best into whatever scheme Savarese ultimately plays? These are the $64,000 Questions for the team.

As much as I want to panic and shit all over this team, I can’t walk too far from the whole idea of “Portland won the Western Conference in 2017.” For what it’s worth, I don’t think attacking players are the problem. If Portland suffers from anything, it’s a decisively non-elite defensive pairing in “Mistakes” Mabiala with Liam “Jogging Whilst Wearing the Captain’s Armband” Ridgewell. While the latter didn’t live up to the role tonight at all, Mabiala looked like the bigger train-wreck and, honestly, MLS has its share of much, much better centerback pairings, so why don’t we?

Once you start from Mabiala and Ridgewell, the larger problem steps forward - i.e., what are Portland’s options? For example, until Diego Chara gets back, who does the team have but Guzman and Cristhian Paredes and/or Larry Olum? And even that opens up the whole noxious can of worms as to whether Guzman punches high enough in MLS. The entire equation gets better/worse when you move to all of Portland’s key fullbacks, really. Whatever you think of Alvas Powell, is Zarek Valentin that much better, and are either of them league-elite? And isn’t that the real question outside Portland’s top-tier offense? Y’know, that magnificent creature that’s being starved…

Overall, I don’t know what’ s wrong. What I do know is that this team is stacked with soccer players who have done well, and in this league and recently. But that doesn’t explain tonight, and it sure as Hell doesn’t excuse it. If a persistent image comes to me in relation to tonight’s obliteration, it’s Asprilla getting the ball somewhere beyond New York’s center stripe and him surging forward. He’s got three New York defenders between him and….well, anything good, and with another 2-3 near enough to cover. Watching Portland in 2018 has conditioned me to expect nothing from this scenario, and that feels wrong, especially after preseason.

And yet this season feels right, like an accurate representation of where the team is at, yes? The defense is, frankly, not good. The defensive midfield is an ever-shifting mess anchored around a moor-less element like Guzman, a player Portland can only pair with either a safe, defensive player (Lawrence Olum) or a youthful unknown (Cristhian Paredes). So maybe you yank Guzman?

Tying all the above together takes you to somewhere fairly unpleasant, at least per the fan brain: Portland is either dysfunctional or bad right now, and there are no clear fixes on the horizon.

On the plus side, I think we’ll be looking in a mirror when we line up next against FC Dallas…

UPDATE:
Just real quick, for the most part, I'm mostly seeing a mix of gloom, people pissed at Liam Ridgewell, like after the DUII-pissed, and one reaction/joke that throws me a little. Broadly, it holds that, 1) The Timbers are on the road and, 2) it's March, and Portland loses in March, so relax and enjoy the home games! I get this, but mostly I don't. Give me a clear, meaningful positive from either loss in 2018. I can't think of one; the team neither defended nor attacked well, if you saw a good corner, I missed it, and I didn't catch even the stalest of promise in how the team links passes together, and, holy shit, was I wrong about Darlington Nagbe?

Also, I could have been clearer (and briefer) above, had only these words come to me: my main consolation in these losses is that Portland ended 2017 as Western Conference champions, and these are all (mostly?) good players who have done good things, and very recently. And, yes, they're better with Diego Chara, no one doubts that. And, no, we can't have Nagbe back. I made a wish and god made it true and I'm very, very sorry to all of you.

Finally, I watched this. My fixation on Portland's spine (and the missing disc to whom we once trilled "Darling") might have come from that, but also how very tired David Guzman looks all the time. And I credit the Portland Mercury's Abe Asher for sharpening my insight on that (e.g., this line "Meanwhile, Guzman again looked woefully incapable of handling a box-to-box role...").