Seattle Sounders 2-3 Portland Timbers: On Confidence & A Larrys Charm in Your Back Pocket

Should make you appreciate the horror of this "good luck" charm...

I posted something late last week as a kind of ambient response to the “wacky unpredictability” of Major League Soccer as a league. I explained the theory behind the response in that original post - and at just plain fucking stupid length, btw - but, here, I mostly want to circle back on how the predictions I made based on that data fared in its first weekend…

…yes, I see the title. I wrote it. It’s relevant, so, please bear with me.

I made 10 predictions on 11 games (on Twitter) - I couldn’t get a clear read on the game that ended with the New England Revolution beating a struggling, game-poor DC United 3-2, so I didn’t call that one - but I got six correct outright. I saw the rough outlines of two more games and, honestly, that New England game broke down about how I expected it to, so that’s either 8-9 broadly correct predictions using what I now feel confident enough to dub The System (and that’s so, so misplaced). As for the games I missed, I think 9 educated pundits in 10 would have called those games the same way - e.g., the Montreal Impact has no business beating Sporting Kansas City and, while Chicago has some legit juice, they’ve mostly been good against weaker teams, so I thought New York City FC would beat them, but, nope, things panned out the other way ‘round…

…I’m also cognizant that NYCFC is adapting to a new coach and they’ve been a little more streaky than the top-, top-tier teams in MLS, so why not a slip? And yet, that somehow doesn’t explain SKC tripping over its own toes in Montreal. I might actually have to watch some tape on that shit, poke around for defects, etc. (Probably not, I got other things, but you never know.)

Contra (what I’m now calling) The SKC Exception, the Portland Timbers' 3-2 win over the Seattle Sounders made sense. It was also a big cold dish of revenge (BONUS!), but key, results-based trends for both teams predicted the distribution of points - e.g., Portland’s steady defense against Seattle’s sputtering attack, the Sounders’ global mediocrity, especially against MLS’s better teams (a-HEM!). Some recent developments - e.g., injuries to Stefan Frei and Roman Torres (aka, arguably the two ventricles of Seattle’s defense) - opened the chance for Portland to run up the score.

As it happens, the game itself unfolded as a muted echo of The SKC Exception. This went beyond Seattle’s half-launched attack scoring two goals (aka, 15% of Seattle’s goals in 2018), and into some highly unexpected thickets. For instance, when I saw Osvaldo Alonso back in the line-up beside Cristian Roldan in Seattle’s 4-2-3-1, I worried those two would pick off all the passes destined for Portland’s attacking players. Speaking of, Portland’s own injury issue(s) saw the oft-struggling Dairon Asprilla start over the currently-gimpy, 2018-Gold-Standard-Star, Sebastian Blanco. Questions proliferated from that puzzle, until Asprilla answered them with his usual effort, decision-making - and all both of those things mean - and one or two damned solid chances. Asprilla didn’t hurt Portland - not that I saw - but I was a little bit more heartened when I saw Diego Valeri pick the ball of a Sounders’ player’s toe after the 80th minute, or when Samuel Armenteros helped clear a corner somewhere between minutes 70-80. Something still more surprising happened yesterday, you see, and the whole damn game did and did not turn on it.

If you and I had watched this game at a bar, and I might have leaned over shortly after the first whistle blew and said, “One of the centerbacks could decide this game,” 80-90% of long-time MLS fans would have assumed I was talking about Seattle’s Chad Marshall. It gets weirder after that because Marshall did score in this game - Seattle’s second equalizer, in fact, a goal that glanced down another, darker fork that this game could have taken - and the player he beat played a really big fucking role in the plot twist I’m presently and somewhat cheaply teasing. With that, I’ll go all-in, pull off the pasties, and acknowledge that, yes, I am talking about Larrys “Fucking” Mabiala, the man who just wrested the Aerial King of Cascadia from off of Chad Marshall’s…notably-shaped head. (That’s a true, Platonic square, right?)

I can’t recall the Timbers ever having a reliable set-piece threat for the length of its time in MLS. If you can recall one, please advise, because, right now, all I’ve got is Kris Boyd making near-post runs again and again for the nine weeks it took every other team in the league to make “the magic” go poof. Yesterday, however, but for Bryan Meredith, Mabiala had a hat-trick. He wound up with two goals in the end - a glorious, head-butted brace - and with the capper coming against none other than Chad “Fucking” Marshall, the very same player that Larrys “Fucking” Mabiala would beat for the game-winner. I mean, this was Black Panther with Marshall as Killmonger and Mabiala as T’Chala (probably?) disputing control of Cascadia rather than Wakanda.

To overstate the hell out of all this, the weirdness of this shift will border on the monumental for as long as it lasts. For as long as Seattle had Marshall at the center of its defense, that felt like a No Man’s Land, a quadrant of a faraway sea teeming with water dragons. Even dating back to his days with the Columbus Crew, playing a cross to anywhere near Marshall made as much sense of throwing darts made from tissue at a dartboard. To see Mabiala find three shots from that space, and to score one of them against Marshall (for funsies, the other one), and that came one thin week after another Mabiala header gave Portland a tie against Atlanta United FC in Atlanta, well, that really makes you wonder if the Timbers didn’t just find some very special combination of a lucky rabbit’s foot and a “Get-Out-of-Jail-Free” card in their collective back pockets.

Happy as I was with the win, I’m happier still that this looked like the best game for Portland that I’d seen in a while - by which I hereby acknowledge that I didn’t see the Atlanta game (or even look at it). As noted between the related posts, Portland’s struggles against both the Los Angeles Galaxy and SKC gave me the beginnings of the jitters (that’s the place where I look for symptoms of a collapse before it comes) and, with that in the back of my mind, I wasn’t quite sure what’d we’d get from the Timbers in a rivalry game on the road. Short answer: a good performance, noteworthy comfort with getting the ball forward, and another, confidence-pile-on road win, aka, one of the stats I most revere in a league that decides its championship with home/away playoff ties.

To circle back to the top, everything pointed to some kind of a result for Portland yesterday, either one point or all three. And it’s here why I want to puncture at least one stat/historical note that circulated around Twitter after the game ended - specifically, people treating the fact that head coach Giovanni Savarese coached Portland to its first ever win against Seattle in the MLS era as ground-breaking. This isn’t about taking anything away from Savarese, either, because I’m pretty damn happy with the trends so far (e.g., playing the team he has instead of trying to stuff them into some random scheme in his head, and that’s on top of a good read on the players he has). I’m mostly making the case that, Portland never beat Seattle in Seattle because two consecutive MLS Cups, and because they’ve had a reasonably strong, consistently ambitious team since Portland came into the league. That visibly does not pertain to the current incarnation of Seattle Sounders FC. In all seriousness, I got a tremor of the jitters(?) when I saw Seattle’s line-up, precisely because they reminded me of all those futile-to-semi-futile trips up North, something announced by the record. That no longer pertains, and that simply can’t be overlooked. Maybe Seattle’s newest (also, only) Peruvian, World Cup/Monarcas Morelia star, Raul Ruidiaz, will reverse the math on that equation, but Seattle has been bad throughout the 2018 season. This team looks uncertain, tentative, puzzled…honestly, I have a thesaurus, and I’m not afraid to use it. Seattle doesn’t know what it’s about right now - and I guess that’s what they mean by that word I hate, “identity,” - and it showed on Saturday, even with them scoring 15% of their goals for this season that very same afternoon. Confidence matters, and the Timbers have a lot more of it, and for all that right reasons.

I want to close with something that both underlines that a little more, and should give Portland fans a little goose of hope for the future. Set aside the good step forward and well-weighted pass that set up Armenteros’ goal, Diego Valeri was loose yesterday. Alvas Powell was worse, if at no time worse when he switched off long enough to let Victor Rodriguez, aka, Seattle’s best player yesterday, score Seattle’s first, hair-raising goal. Powell…I’ve swallowed more doubts about him than most players on Portland’s roster, but I’m also feeling the soft contours of my personal impatience with him. Bottom line, the Timbers have a good right back in Powell, but think what a great one could mean to this club, and as currently constituted. Portland continues to use the right fullback for width and Powell…he just doesn’t seem to know what to do up there. Look, this is what could be, more about an upgrade than addressing a problem, etc.

To close on a high, though, Zarek Valentin, people. If there’s a more improved player for the Timbers this season, his name is Sebastian Blanco. Regardless, that Zarek kid is killin' it, and I don’t even want that note to suffer by comparison with Blanco. I lost track of the number of times he rotated to the center to cover the weak side when Portland’s centerbacks shifted toward the danger, but Valentin saved at least two goals (probably). And, finally, and to get back to Savarese, I’m entirely on-board with him starting Armenteros over Fanendo Adi going forward. I just think he works better in a system that relies on mobility more than back-to-goal-play, i.e., a system that would better suit Adi.

OK, that’s it. In the event it’s not clear, I’m happy. I would have eaten the draw to LA, and even a loss to SKC in Portland, had Portland looked as good against either of them as they did against Seattle yesterday. How a team plays, the way they find a way forward, and how the defense functions as a unit, and not individuals, always matters. I’ve seen people talk up Portland’s (now) 10-game unbeaten streak, but recent performances/results have left me feeling antsy. Winning a game like this - one the Timbers should win regardless of venue - gooses my faith in the overall project.

And that’s both plenty and it. Bon nuit.