Real Salt Lake 1-2 Portland Timbers: "Much More Cleaner With That Finishing Product"

Jon Payne is the only one-armed bandit you should run towards.

That subtitle quotes Brian Dunseth from the broadcast booth, and fairly late in the game. It is a clunky masterpiece. Due to the editing on the condensed game, it came context-free, but I can only assume he’s crediting Portland for superior finishing. If so, I don’t think he got it quite right, because things got weirder than that.

Diego Valeri’s game-winning goal contains within itself the sheer improbability of the Portland Timbers' 2-1 win over Real Salt Lake down in sunny Sandy, Utah. The wicked beauty of the shot notwithstanding, Diego had to slice that between two sets of legs, each oriented along a different axis, to knock that past Andrew “Who?” Putna. The Timbers did plenty of things right yesterday evening, but there’s not much point avoiding how much good fortune gave an assist on both Timbers goals. When you’re blessed, you’re blessed. What are you gonna do?

With the way it warped physics, Valeri’s goal rendered an unspoken final judgment on the game, one that lingered in the air after Steve Clark’s save on Albert Rusnak’s (deserved) 23rd-minute penalty kick. It said, no, Real Salt Lake will not win this game. Not for anything they have done wrong – though they certainly had (see below) – and not for anything they would do wrong after Valeri's shot rolled around inside the net, but, in that precise moment, it became manifest where the good Lord chose to shine his favor. The result feels a little Calvinistic, predestination meets soccer, and so on, but there's that old saying about God and mysterious ways.

To turn now to the “works” part of the “faith v. works” argument, Portland didn’t do much to earn the win. For too much of the game, they played as if they could only complete a pass if the ball hit an RSL player on the way to the next Timber. Sloppy doesn’t begin describe it – “a fucking mess” comes closer – but, in the end, their sins against the sport end there. When called upon to defend, the Timbers back four either defended well (Bill Tuiloma, especially, put in a strong emergency shift; e.g., “Tuiloma, right place” at the end of this clip) or well enough to convince RSL that their best chances could come from range. To borrow/adapt a phrase from my earlier post on FC Cincinnati’s loss (hurt), while I can’t call this a good game for Portland, I can call it a good result, maybe even a great one. In a lot of ways, the Timbers are running out of ways to fuck up this long road trip.

To shift to RSL’s perspective, this one had to hurt more than a little. Given how the match played out, a 2-2 draw should have been the worst possible result – and they have every right to resent the cosmic screwing. That said, they made the decision to take those shots from range and, while it wasn’t a terrible idea (i.e., they had the openings and they have the talent to score these), one could argue that they rushed the several head-start opportunities the Timbers handed them by turning over the ball (or giving it away), often at or near the top of their own defensive third. The plot thickens when you consider that RSL scored the one time they managed to actually break down Portland’s defense (and that’s one hell of a back-heel by Corey Baird; did not think he had that in him). Credit the Timbers defense for raising the bar for getting behind them to camel-through-the-eye-of-a-needle level stuff, but that detail alone hangs an asterisk behind the disparity on shots between the two teams.

At the same time, there is no point downplaying Portland’s fairly extreme luck on the attacking side of the ball. After you re-read the notes on Valeri’s goal above, consider at least one key similarity between that shot and Sebastian Blanco’s game-opening goal: in both cases, the ball bounced “at random” to the feet of a Portland player likely to bury it (I saw Angels in the Outfield (15 times), and know a miracle when I see one (e.g., Dunseth’s quote in the subtitle)). With the traffic stacked up between him and the goal, Valeri had a lot more work to do than Blanco, but the latter owed his goal to a two-step tragedy of errors from RSL’s defense: the first step came when Putna batted his save straight ahead, maybe 6 yards in front of himself; the second came when RSL central defender Nedum Onuoha opted to defend the shot on that loose ball instead of lunging at it with every available inch of his body. That was, in so many words, inexplicable (and, when combined with how Onuoha bit on Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s dummy in the LA Galaxy’s first goal last weekend, it paints a picture worth staring at a while longer). If Rio Tinto Stadium was a one-armed bandit, Portland would be well-advised to run to the equivalent of the slot machine furthest from, because those things have a curse to shake off after a certain amount of giving things away.

Given how well RSL has played lately (also, have they?), and given how well they played last night, the Timbers did their shot at long-term success a solid with the three points they smuggled out of Sandy, Utah. Sure, they’re still tied for “below-the-playoff-line,” but that doesn’t erase the argument that they’re genuinely in reach of a good start to the 2019 season – and that’s with starting their first 12 games on the road. To rephrase that thought the same way I did going into 2019, had you offered your average Timbers fan 12 points or more from the opening road trip, I’m confident most of them would take it without blushing.

By way of comparison, DC United had 10 points at the end of its first 12 games last season, and that was with two matches at home, and one of those “at home.” Even with that 12-point target (which I just made up) just two points away, that doesn’t mean they’ll get there, even with three games left in the road trip. The opposition doesn’t getting any easier, for one - they get the Vancouver Whitecaps, the Houston Dynamo and the Philadelphia Union over the next three games. But, by way of useful, immediate comparison, consider that Portland just lined up three wins and with a 1.0 goals against average against Columbus Crew SC, Toronto FC, and, now, RSL. To take a stab at handicapping, I’d accept that Vancouver roughly equals Columbus, but Houston’s defense is probably better than Toronto’s (especially at the time/circumstances Portland played them), and their attack just a strong, and I’m also somewhat-to-pretty sure that Philly is a better team than RSL top-to-bottom. With that in mind, I’d call four points from those next three games a good haul. To go back to the end of the previous paragraph, I believe most Timbers fans would be happy to come out of the never-ending road-stop with 14 points…

…and all that means is that, what you’re really watching for his how far the Timbers break on either side of that 14-point benchmark. To hazard a guess, only three straight losses would actually deflate fan enthusiasm (with allowance for brave/competent losses), while anything north of 12 points would get belief to where you see it in your more ecstatic and resilient faiths. With that, you have this remarkable situation where people could feel genuine enthusiasm about a team that left 2/3 of the available points on the board.