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.

Ridgewell arguably over-achieved this year, and he had company. And that’s where this review becomes a recap of the Portland Timbers’ 2018. And I can think of no better place to start it than with this:

“To loop back to that question, do I feel good about this season? Yes. By that I mean, I see good things a-birthing… It has a short shelf life, as in it could win a cup, MLS, Open, or otherwise, but it won’t do any of that until it accounts for how a team with, per the formation, seven players behind the ball, can give up as many chances as Portland gave to Minnesota tonight.”

I wrote that after the Timbers picked up their first win of the season, against Minnesota United FC at home in Week 6 (and, no, I don’t entirely get the connection between “short shelf-life” and winning a Cup). Winless to that point, nothing about what had come before hinted at even competence – the team lead MLS in goals against, having allowed 14 in six games (2.33 per game, y’all!) – but, between a road draw against Chicago and the first 70 minutes of a road loss against Orlando City SC, I’d caught enough positive vibes to feel that. By Week 8, a road win over San Jose, I was writing things like this:

“…when he lunged forward to clear a ball about 30 yards from Portland’s goal - i.e., well inside no-man’s land – [Jeff] Attinella played that moment with confidence, like he knew where the people around him would either be, or go, when he stepped forward. The general trends look strong and real, but that detail - a growing sense of who does what, when and where on the field - goes farthest in terms of making me think Portland could have places to go this season.”

I read every post-game wrap from 2018 before writing this and, holy shit, that’s a lot of typos. As suggested by the quotes above, however, there was also a lot of faith. That faith came earlier than I remembered until reviewing my notes – and that wasn’t the only surprise I found. From this point forward, I want to map out what happened this season, and to float a theory as to why things so very nearly came off in the end. I’ll wrap up by discussing a handful of players who perhaps need some sorting out as the team looks to 2019. Speaking of, a handful of famous names aside – e.g., The Holy Trinity of Diego Valeri, Diego Chara and Sebastian Blanco, maybe with a side-sainthood for Jeff Attinella – Portland’s players don’t make league-best lists on the regular. In so many words, the Timbers’ run to MLS Cup was both a true team effort and a minor miracle. A friend once told me that guts and duct tape held together the Russian space program. While I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the statement, that feels like a solid metaphor for the Timbers 2018. Let’s review…

The season started poorly, as noted above, and it didn’t take a murderer’s row of opposition to cause it: sure, the New York Red Bulls blew out Portland – a game that saw Ridgewell benched for, as I put it, “Jogging Whilst Wearing the Captain’s Armband” – and, by that time, no one knew what to make of either FC Dallas or the Los Angeles Galaxy, but with the Chicago Fire following that, and Orlando following Chicago…look, I don’t know where I got the confidence, I just did.

Strangely, though, that confidence held up because, after that win over Minnesota, Portland wouldn’t lose for the next 18 games, across all competitions; they’d even win the next five (and six of the next seven), and that wasn’t easy either, seeing as they had to beat fashionably popular teams like Los Angeles FC and New York City FC (the latter, quite thoroughly to boot) plus games on the road against the San Jose Earthquakes and the Colorado Rapids. They beat the Seattle Sounders twice during those 18 games (#foreshadowing) and wrapped a ribbon around a perfect series against the ‘Quakes. None of this, by the way, made any goddamn sense…

This was entirely the same team that started the season with the Sophie’s Choice of having a snowball’s chance of scoring versus giving up…just terrible, embarrassing goals. The losses to the Galaxy and RBNY had already dragged the Christmas Tree (4-3-2-1) out of the closet – early as the third game, in fact – but the Timbers would still give up 2.0 goals per game over the next four. And then, out of the blue, the defense locked into place. It was never perfect – they coughed up the odd two goals against, but while keeping the overall line under 1.0 goal against per game – but the team was, on the whole and crucially, balanced. Generally, the defense dropped into a low(-ish) block and, after they patiently either coaxed the ball from the attacking team or forced them to fuck up, they’d release Blanco and Valeri into space and – voila! – they’d steal goals like starlings, but in a really clever and aesthetic way, and not in a shitty or filthy way like real starlings.  At some point in the middle of this (again, Game 10; slipped some good lines in that one), I was writing things like: “this is nothing more or less than a team that understands what each player needs to do and, at this point, their belief is a funk that rises off the field.”

As (very) close readers would know, I wrote pretty much the same thing during Portland’s stealth run through the 2018 MLS Playoffs. When this team was good, it was fucking good, capable of beating anyone in MLS. But that leads to Phase 2. Or, rather, Phase 1.5, because a little stream trickled under that glorious pillar…and little streams cause erosion…

Somehow, I’d internalized the idea that Portland was terrible on the road – that’s in spite of wins over Colorado and San Jose (yeah, yeah; wait for it) – but I was already getting butt-puckered about home draws only 12 games into the season. A home draw against the Galaxy looked especially ominous; call me paranoid (just…paranoid), but, watching LA suffocate the outlets to Valeri and Blanco, I saw a team that had solved the riddle to Portland’s (fragile?) balance. From that point on, every soft result, every mediocre performance, flashed like road-side warning signs. Something about a bridge being out. (pfft!)

The Timbers would maintain its crazy positive trend for another nine games after that LA draw. They survived games without Blanco, and several without Ridgewell, even the odd absence of Chara; Fanendo Adi toasted his time with the Timbers by scoring one last goal for the road, I fixated on whether Polo or Cristhian Paredes gave enough to the club going in either direction, etc. The party came to a second-act-appropriate end with four straight losses, two of them bad and, some of them, avoidable, at least as I saw it. Some part of this came from Savarese tinkering with the set-up – his worst decision was trying three at the back, but there were a couple other mild stabs in the dark - but I assume he tinkered because he saw a team getting away with success instead of making it. The meddling didn’t pan out, at least not for the most part, but it served a purpose, one that would only become apparent later. There was, however, something else very much on my mind…

Until I went back to check, I’d forgotten how out of twist I’d gotten about Portland failing to rest key players. To this day, I remember seething for a period of eight minutes late in one game, waiting for Savarese to take a clearly leg/life-drunk Valeri out of a game the Timbers already had under control. The same thing happened with Chara, Blanco, Mabiala and even Valentin, in that game and others – the road loss to DC especially; it got to where I speculated over whether Gio wanted to kill his best players. Those four losses happened during (appropriately) a torrid period in August, and all those key players looked close to fainting several games prior. It didn’t feel like a coincidence. The idea of resting any player followed from a belief that would find confirmation in Week 26, on the road at New England: if Portland had an elite starting eleven, then wasn’t getting them to the post-season whole and (as) rested as possible (under the habits and laws of sports) the most important thing the team could do? If so…why are we making Valeri drag himself to the sideline for one more week?

I’ll end that semi-blow-by-blow there because we all know how the season ended. The Timbers kicked out of that four-game funk and proceeded to teeter toward success on a tightrope for the rest of the season. Don’t take this as a strict chronology, but Portland would (finally) settle on a four-man backline by Game 27 (confident 2-0 win away to Colorado) and it would take all the way to Week 32, aka, The Turning Point of the Season, to have the 4-2-3-1 in place, and with Chara and David Guzman at the heart of it. I didn’t want to call the October 6 road win over Real Salt Lake – i.e., that game, Game 32 - a key moment in the season, not least because everyone else does (and I want to be novel). Honestly, I was holding out for the 3-2 home win over Columbus Crew SC a few weeks earlier, but that’s bullshit, because Portland lost to fucking Houston and Minnesota on either side of that. The reality is that, after settling into that 4-2-3-1, the Timbers went on their second run of the season, going 6-1-1 through the end of the season…

…and against the best teams in MLS. That’s one hell of an ending, people, a glorious one even. Better still, there’s a glorious argument/mythology underneath it.

Right around the time I started freaking out about starters getting rested, it started to happen. That wasn’t the only example either: the tinkering with the formation kicked in around or shortly after those home draws made me cranky. To be clear, I am in no way claiming I had those ideas first (or that I have fans in the Timbers Org), but that the Timbers’ coaching staff saw clear problems with the team – stuff an amateur could see (e.g., me) - and they addressed them. To underline this disclaimer in Sharpie, I’m not even sure what the fixes were; I only know they worked well enough to take a good team to places generally reserved for great teams – e.g., a long, loosely-meritocratic cup final.

In the end, I believe I liked this season because I understood it. When something didn’t make sense, someone in the Timbers org. fixed it. A lot of credit for all that has to go to Giovanni Savarese. By all appearances, he never stopped thinking about the team and how to improve it. Way back in Week 15 (road win over Seattle; huh), I credited him for “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 credited that, in turn, to coaching in the NASL, a space where creativity might carry you farther than your budget (this was last night; don’t try to find it). I found Year 1 under Gio encouraging, even reassuring.

Before closing with other business (or the same business, really), all the players visibly bled for the team too – can’t believe I didn’t mention that till now – but, if you read everything I wrote this season (plenty of links above!), you’ll see some version of that sentiment repeating over and over. This was a wonderful season, honestly, and certainly my favorite of the MLS era. It was easy to pull for the Portland Timbers in 2018 for more ways than I can count. It was a high-wire act throughout, and maybe that has something to do with it. Who doesn’t like an underdog?

In that spirit (or something parallel to it, if distantly…or not parallel to it), I want to talk about the guys under the top card players – e.g., the guys who do the heaviest lifting (The Holy Trinity (plus one) named above) for Portland. Timbers fans talk/enthuse over those guys all the time, so I thought I’d close with the rest of them (where warranted). Through that, I’ll take some shots at seeing what the future might hold for the Timbers. All that starts, unfortunately, with a quick note on said holy trinity.

The (Career) Grim Reaper Awaits

Both Valeri and Chara turn 33 next season; Blanco, meanwhile, turns 31, and goalkeepers don’t count (so, shut up, JeffJeffJeff). Just about everything that made this team work this season has about two years left in the tank. Let’s just put in a pin in that, yes?

MIPs (Most Improved Players)

Stick with Blanco and add Zarek Valentin to the mix. In Valentin’s case, this was a matter of stepping up, whether in execution, leadership, balls or savvy. He got his ass yanked, spanked and handed to him against Sporting Kansas City at the end of the season (God, I wish I could erase that memory), but he had a stellar season. As for Blanco, what is there to say, except that he carried the team everywhere Valeri couldn’t. I think there’s a reason for that (from Week 9, and I think it holds up):

“Blanco is playing where he’s comfortable, for one - a lot like Valeri, basically - and he’s having games where he’s the most dangerous player on the field (e.g., today) as a result.”

I have a weird relationship with The Holy Trinity, one that I suspect will resolve rather emotionally when the time comes for parting. As for the rest, in alphabetical order (wish I was kidding, but I see the time, even if you don’t).

Samuel Armenteros

Was it just me, or did Timbers fans turn on this guy by year’s end? To the extent any of it felt hostile…and it did at times, I don’t get it. He topped out at eight goals, but he managed at least two beauties - hell, one of them had people checking the sky for his ceiling – but, whether by form or by injury (honestly, I don’t know), he definitely fell out of the picture. Last time I saw him, he was celebrating a win in which he had, at best, an indirect part. I wouldn’t bust ass to keep him, but I’m also not sure he’s done.

Dairon Asprilla

Is it worth it for a team to keep a player around just for November, or even October. If he’s as good a (lung-busting) sub as Asprilla, sure. At least until you can do better.

The…ah, Situation at Centerback

I think this team played above its centerbacks in 2018. Because I am, literally, scrolling through Portland’s roster, this starts with Julio Cascante, a solid one-on-one defender who played his way out of my good graces by way of 1) gaffes and/or own goals, 2) getting played at one of the side threes in a 3-5-2, which doesn’t suit him. Moving on, Larrys Mabiala dueled Chad (Fucking) Marshall for greatest aerial threat in Cascadia this season, but he also got caught on mediocre reads and, on at least two occasions this season (including during MLS Cup), he nearly got beat by not stepping to the ball. He’s also a little gaffe-prone. Bill Tuiloma provided a reliable back-up, but can he hold down the steady starting gig and, from the other side of the age spectrum, how ya feelin’, Ridgy? Older? Itchy feet? Something else?

What I mean by all that, is that I don’t know whether that set of players even outlasts The Holy Trinity…

Steve Clark

No offense to the guy, because I like him, but I’m not there on him. I won’t piss and moan if he stays, and I’ll always pull for him, but it’ll take the run I don’t think he’ll ever get to sell me on him.

Tomas Conechny 
Does Portland keep him? (This assumes they have a choice.)

Castaway 
Andres Flores performed in 2018, sometimes better, sometimes bravely. The same goes for Lawrence Olum, and maybe even Paredes. I haven’t seen his upside yet, but baybe the team grooms Paredes for another season. Olum is a known quantity to the simplest point of “Yes, you need the cover” or you don’t, but Flores…if I had to upgrade any of the three roughly analogous players, it’d be him.

David Guzman 
After he went down from injury after starting the first four(?) games, I spent a shocking amount of the season pining for Guzman’s return. That happened, in earnest, around Week 25, when the thought that would hatch in Week 33 when I called him “the most potentially transformational player on the roster” (or something like that). At the same time, a reason or two make a pretty good case for keeping him out of the elite. As for 2019, if he stays, I want either real competence and consistency for most of the season, or an injury that excuses it…at which point the team an trade him for being injured too often.

Lucas Melano 
That’s all I’ve got. So far he’s like owning an expensive painting that no one likes.

Andy Polo 
My biggest hope is that the team can get more attacking upside out of him next year. He looks bored.

Alvas Powell 
I praised him, like, a lot more than I remembered, and on the attacking side of the ball. He doesn’t walk on water or anything, but the guy continues to have his moments. It took FC Cincinnati taking an interest for me to wonder what it’d be like if Powell was gone. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t like it either.

Liam Ridgewell 

He’ll be 35 in July. I hope the team signs him (at a reduced rate, if they can), and that he retires here. That assumes he wants to. I’ve struggled with Ridgewell, but, this year, he earned my respect.

I think I’m as high on him as any defender for Portland. For a 23-year-old, he’s got a good brain, and he’s pretty stout physically. I wouldn’t build around him yet (or maybe ever; some guys don’t do that), but he’s a keeper for me.

Jorge Villafana is Jorge Villafana, and I think I’ll close on that. Bottom line, the team’s best pieces should, barring injury, carry through to 2019. There’s a good supporting cast here, but one that could stand a few upgrades. If I had to start anywhere, I’d go after a starting-caliber centerback, to the best of my ability, and same thing at forward. I’d also work on something in central midfield, something to get Polo out on the wing (so people can see if he’s worth the time). Fixing two of those should keep Portland reasonably close to contender status, barring injury at least. Fixing even one might get them in the playoffs.
 

My final thought on 2018 is this: the Timbers have a coach who is willing to think his way around problems, someone who can get the most out of, say, an Andres Flores. I don’t mean any disrespect to Flores by that comment either; he’s the kind of guy who can make the sum of a team’s parts mean more than any star player. Guys like him carried Portland through 2018, and within a fingernail’s width of glory. That’s one hell of an accomplishment for a team with a shortage of household names.

Thank you, Portland Timbers, for one hell of a season. I enjoyed the hell out of it, so thank you!