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.