Toronto FC 1-2 Portland Timbers: Calling It 3-1 (And Deus Ex Machina!)

Portrait of the typist, and his wife.

In a good and justice universe, Diego Chara would have tucked away the shot on that late, last hurrah forward. He didn’t, of course, but a 3-1 win would have given the world a better read on what happened earlier today, that one time, in Toronto. The final score read 2-1, Portland Timbers over Toronto FC, but, if I was a Toronto fan today, I’d be getting seriously nervous about my team’s defensive shape. 10 goals allowed in four games equals new and bad math…

To switch to fan mode for a second, holy shit, right guys!? The Portland Timbers are now on four games of their last five looking pretty good, and two games into a formation arrangement that looks sound as the blessed and holy Christmas Tree of 2018, while looking more dangerous in the attack. And Portland got two wins in each game with the new formation, and on the road, so this is all gravy right now. I put up a poll before the season started asking people where they thought the Timbers would be at the end of their long…was it Finland where Vladimir Lenin was exiled? Anyway, their opening road trip has been long but, according to the percentages, the general (positive) belief was that Portland would end the road trip with between 12 and 15 points and, looking at the Form Guide, the next four games look…gyuhhh, man, I think I found tomorrow’s poll, so start thinking about it. The next four games for Portland are: @ RSL, @ VAN, @ HOU, @ PHI. With the Timbers currently on seven points, where do you put their odds of getting to 12, never mind 15?

Short answer: way fucking better after today, and last week (and the week before, then two weeks before that). Without delving into prophecy, what’s happening now tracks with what happened in 2018: the Timbers started slow – if with fewer games on the road…hold on [sound of needle tearing through a record, what?], poop just got interesting. A little time traveling just reminded me that the Timbers compiled a 3-3-2 record to start last season, and that was with six games on the road and just two at home. Things aren’t great right now, obviously – 2-5-1, to be exact, and with a defense that has, to this point, looked Twilight-Zone ugly (yes, I got the point of the episode) – but that’s still 11 points versus seven points, and with 2019 all happening on the road. I dunno, maybe the sky isn’t falling? (Or is it just that the Western Conference is better than the Eastern Conference? Shit! I haven’t even started to measure that!)

To step away from the big picture and back into the game, I don’t know where your expectations were going in. Personally, I approached the game from a solidly middling perspective, if a little infatuated with the new formation (e.g., this one, the 4-4-2 that flexed considerably in real time). The first…10 minutes(?) justified that mind-set – Toronto pressed well enough to keep the Timbers pinned in their own end and, even when that dried up, they still stole the kind of sloppy, stressy first goal that the Timbers allow when they’re all sixes and sevens. Portland central defender and on-and-off starter Bill Tuiloma thundered back with a goal so strapping that it all but screamed “not today!” to the reverberating Canadian heavens (Valhalla, I am calling!). And the game just rolled downhill in Portland’s favor from there. Seriously, I had to put effort into feeling stressed out and, absolutely, again, I’d be stressing out right now if I was a Toronto FC fan.

And that’s actually where this whole thing gets messy. Regardless of what Portland did today, Toronto became crazy reactive somewhere around the 15th minute of the game, and that never stopped. Once the Timbers broke through, TFC looked like paper tiger, and all the futile crosses of the first half ended in the second with Jeremy Ebobisse lunging his one clear shot home - and I think clear shots are what the lad needs, if only by style and disposition. All the same, none of that explains why Toronto grew patient to the point where Portland decided what would happen, and where, or that they’d wait an eternity before choosing their time. With that, I’m going to pause an open letter to Toronto FC.

Dear Toronto FC:

What the Hell happened out there this afternoon? No moment better encapsulates…just everything after the 20th minute than a point around the 90th, when, with the Timbers tightening the noose around the neck, Michael Bradley stepped up to chase the ball…and while every. single. one. of. his teammates, held back watching, and camping. In that moment, probably around the 85th minute, everyone waited for someone else to step up, but – and this is key – only Bradley did it. That was Toronto’s afternoon in a nutshell. When he stepped and no other Toronto player squeezed tighter into his personal man….well, obviously, the Timbers kept playing and the world and circumstances improved from there. At that point, the question becomes, did Toronto play mid-week? The answer is not just “no,” but that they played Friday of last week, and they played at home, so no travel. Rest, in other words, was not an issue.

Signed, The Universe

I’m not trying to excuse TFC, so much as I’m flagging the potentiality that Toronto had something other than a good game. For a team that came in 3-0-1 at home, and against a team “rocking” a 1-5-1 (till tonight) record, and that has allowed a stupid amount of goals on their way into this one, Toronto barely managed the one (1) goal they scored today (and, to point it out, this was the only time this season that a team has held TFC to just one goal). So…does that make that two (2) reputations shredded in one (1) afternoon? Personally, I never say never till I have enough weeks behind me to say, yes, and with proof!

At any rate, I think a lot of the above was laid out with an eye to detailing what the Timbers were up against tonight. And - holy crap! – it worked! And it could have worked even better! (See the lede!). The question, however, is why it worked. And here’s my theory on that, also very nearly the sub-title to this post.

Functioning Partnerships
At some point during the game, sideline hero, Nat Borchers held up a solid central defensive partnership as one of the keys to the game – e.g., knowing that the guy beside you will do what you expect and/or the right thing (when you don’t agree on what to expect). He made the point in the specific context of “The French Connection” (also, see it), e.g., Larrys Mabiala and Tuiloma, the Timbers’ two Fracophiles, or Franco-speakers, etc. For what it’s worth, I think Mabiala/Tuiloma feels like the partnership for the (present) future (till we get another dude who isn't Claude Dielna). What occurred to me tonight is the potentiality that the Timbers have similar kinds of pairings all over the field, symbiotic relationships that are starting to work, and precisely because they make sense.

Mabiala and Tuiloma is obvious, probably as obvious as the tandem that’s only just started to work recently, Chara and Cristhian Paredes (who, btw, has looked like a smart pick-up lately!), but it gets trickier (actually, no) after that. Andres Flores and Jorge Moreira, form a moon-shot tandem on Portland’s right where Flores is the moon, and Moreira is the being/entity/space captain getting sling-shot around it. The second partnership, Sebastian Blanco and Zarek Valentin, seems a little more nebulous, at least in terms of today’s win. If anyone on the field had license to roam tonight, it was Blanco…and yet how many times did you see Valentin in the highest reaches of the attack and, yes, I’m asking because I lost track.

It’s the final partnership that really catches my eye, precisely because it’s the most tenuous. Ebobisse and Diego Valeri are both listed as forwards, and that makes sense as far as it goes – if only because Valeri doesn’t need the defensive work at this point. That said, in spite of being vastly different players – and because Ebobisse does genuinely solid defensive work - they play a similar kind of game: combination plus movement for the most part, the work of creating the tap-in (Ebobisse’s favorite!). Strong as he is – and I still rate him as a back-to-goal combination guy (but is that what you need?) - Ebobisse isn’t a natural striker (exactly!). He plays closer to what Valeri does, only with a fairly profound drop off in talent and intuition, and with one hell of a lot more physical presence at his disposal. The reason I don’t write him off is that I see him make good plays all over the field, and that he already has four entirely earned goals eight games into 2019, which officially makes Ebobisse 4/11th of the Timbers’ total offense. He’s literally scoring a goal every other game, so…at what point, you know? (The exact point is when that pattern falls off, obviously).

This was a nice win, really and, temptation aside, I don’t want to project too much out of it. If Portland gets six points out of any two out of RSL, Vancouver and Houston, and on the road, sure, call me. My point is, that’s one hell of a gauntlet, and I didn’t even loop in Philly yet. On the other hand, this is a team rounding into the same kind of monomaniacal focus and sense of roles and purpose that carried them pretty damn far and/or till the end last season. Overall, though, things are OK right now. The plow goes uphill from here, but even this current team is rounding into something better than what we all watched in March.