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| 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.
I want to pause here to spare a sympathetic thought for FC
Dallas, Maximiliano Urruti and Dallas fans, and in that order (Dallas fans come
last because that empty stadium). For one, the box score is every one bit times
1,000 as bad as I thought it would be, a massacre in number form…but, all the
same, they only put six shots on Attinella’s goal and he saved five of them
with comparatively extreme parts of his body - heads, feet, shins, what have
you. To disabuse anyone who might harbor any delusions about this, the Timbers
did very little on the attacking side of the ledger tonight. Long story short,
Valeri had two perfect moments tonight, while Dallas had six good ones, and 22
extraordinarily rough variations on Maxi Urruti wailing in frustration toward
goal from 35 yards out and expecting something positive to happen.
In my preview tweets, I identified only one of the players
that terrorized Portland’s defense tonight - Zeigler, on set pieces (with the
lead pipe) - but Michael Barrios conducted a full-on campaign of warfare
against Portland’s right; he would out-flank Jorge Villafana
time and again to serve the kind of ball that gets stuck in fans’ throats. It
took a combination of empty spaces, bad shots, and Jeff Attinella kick saves to
keep the ball out of Portland’s net. Dallas obliged and, honestly, I can’t help
but think of how their team and fans feel after so thoroughly dominating the
game. They’re as sad as I am happy and, given Dallas’ long history of flaming-out
frustration, my heart goes out to them.
I won’t spend much time thinking about what comes next
because, either way, I expect it’ll be pretty awful. I’m not even sure whether
Portland has the better chance against Sporting Kansas City or the Seattle
Sounders, I do expect a tall-order series. The most important thing, however,
is that the Portland Timbers have a rough ‘n’ reasonable best-possible team lined
up for this series - and I’ll close out on that.
Did Larrys Mabiala deserve that red card - something matters because he'll miss the first leg (right?). That call depends
on the person. As I told the guy next to me at the bar tonight, I would have
called that a yellow in any game. That doesn’t mean the call was unfair, only
that I would have called it differently, because I’m me. And that brings me to
the thing that gives me the most faith for the next leg: Portland caught its
luckiest break (e.g., The Forehead Save)
before the sending off, and they didn’t give Dallas much to shoot out after
that. That doesn’t mean they didn’t give up shots on goal because, Jesus
Christ, did they ever and thanks for the ulcer. At the same time, the lanes/angles
for those shots were generally narrow and, again, Attinella. The game
absolutely threatened to get away from Portland and on multiple occasions. It
didn’t, at the end of the day, and that’s all that matters.
This was a glorious, happy, wonderful win. I’m delighted I
saw it - and in some nicely enthusiastic company to boot. More to the point, I
think the team is lined up right, that it’s starting its best pieces, and in
the positions where they should play - and that Portland is lucky to have all
those players healthy. More than anything else, I’m absolutely fucking thrilled
to have a man like Diego Valeri in the line-up (and “man” is deliberate for all
that he encompasses), because he really was the difference between these two
teams today. And, just as important as that is, getting players like Guzman,
Ebobisse and - dammit, how have I not mentioned him yet? - Zarek Valentin on the
field and up to the right levels has turned the Portland Timbers into a
competitive outfit in the wily Western Conference.
Bottom line, even though the Timbers, as a whole, didn’t do
much tonight, not one player had a meaningfully bad game out there. And…yeah, I
think that is literally all you can ask for. Bring on the next eleven dorks.
Let’s do this, y’all.
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