Vancouver Whitecaps 1-0 Portland Timbers: Plus a Third Hand...

Yaaasss. (Also, is this the right Birdman for the reference. #shit.)

“Just like Birdman, hit you with a left, then a right, plus a third hand.”
- KOOL A.D.

Yeah, I know. That’s just what came to me for the title, so I wanted to at least give the source.

The litmus test for how you feel about the Portland Timbers’ 0-1 loss to the Vancouver Whitecaps at BC Place tonight has exactly one question in it: do you feel like the Timbers should have tied that game? If you answered no, yeah, this loss feels like a disaster. If you answer yes, well, that's the fun part: the answer is multiple choice.

I’ll start by borrowing from the Tale of Two Halves cliché (“it was the worst of times, and everyone else lived in London”), and call tonight’s loss A Tale of One-Third and Two-Thirds. Another soccer cliché comes in as well, e.g., playing on the front foot. I don’t think even Timbers fans would dispute that Vancouver outright owned the first 1/3 of the game; going the other way, I don’t think any ‘Caps fan would argue against ceding the final 1/3 of the game to the Timbers. The middle third feels a little more up for grabs, but within a Venn diagram that where the Tale of One-Third and Two-Thirds overlaps with parts of the Tale of Two Halves, and I can’t show you the wedges of each circle, so I’ll stop trying and switch to another line of argument.

If I had to weigh what Vancouver did against Portland in the first 1/3 of the game against what Portland did to Vancouver in the final 1/3, I see the scale tipping toward the Timbers. And that’s where the sub-title for this post came from (e.g., hitting someone from multiple sides), and why I feel OK about this loss. On the (theoretically) bleak side, I see tonight as a blown opportunity to investigate or, God forbid, seek to expand on the first team’s attacking potential, but that’s only leaving some personal, impractical theories on the table. Giovanni Savarese doesn’t have that luxury, just as no coach ever will, so I don’t remotely blame him for sticking with the Plan A that has brought the Timbers three straight wins. I just hope they can bottle whatever Savarese said or did to get the team geared up for that second half (is it amphetamines or is it Maybelline?), because it worked – and better than any of the time/space warping madness Portland used to beat Real Salt Lake last week.

And yet it gets weirder.

Somewhere around the 77th minute, the broadcast booth announced that the Timbers had 22 shots to Vancouver’s nine (significant because I had to use full words to describe Vancouver’s shots total #PortlandROCKSCascadiaKings!), and, because the Timbers kept pouring on the pressure from there, the sharpest end of the statistics tilted heavily toward Portland. Hell, Sebastian Blanco had seven shots on his own before he came off, over half the whole goddamn Vancouver line-up. And there’s a lot of story behind even that…Jesus, why does feel like therapy for the one fucking time I gouged the eyes out of my kid sister’s stuffed animals (Full disclosure, I made that up; also, I have no kid sister, it’s a metaphor).

What I’m searching for is the qualitative difference between the fairly capable way the ‘Caps got around and, at one point, through Portland’s defense, against the way the Timbers yanked Vancouver’s defense from one side of the field to the other, creating (sadly) unexploited openings all the while. The Mothership split the highlights fairly evenly, but the yawning gap in shots attempted didn’t come from nowhere. In the early stages of the first half, Vancouver found weak-side openings on the right side of Portland’s centerbacks, and they exploited one of those for Fredy Montero’s game-winning goal. The broadcast booth repeatedly gave Jorge Moreira grief for leaving that space open, and, yeah, they’re not far off on that. At the same time, that happened (and, honestly, especially on the goal) when Moreira got up-field and into the attack, and to pretty good effect through Vancouver’s period of dominance. It’s possible, in fact, that Moreira provided a majority percentage of the attack during an opening sluggish-‘n’-confused 30 for Portland.

Portland switched the point of attack in the second half, sending it down the left and largely through Blanco who, based on what I watched tonight, single-handedly put Vancouver’s whole damn defense through the taffy stretcher. I’ll be the first to admit that stretching a defense doesn’t always result in clear chances at goal – apart from a couple first half shots off corner kicks for each of Portland’s centerbacks, Diego Valeri’s “the-gang’s-all-here” near-miracle really was Portland’s best, fairly lonely opportunity on the night – but that doesn’t change the (arguable) reality that the Timbers played the ‘Caps off their own field in the second half. Vancouver had a couple chances, sure, but the Timbers’ attack kept Vancouver’s defense chasing and scrambling more or less from the 55th minute onwards. When Portland got their thing going, it was pretty goddamn effective, and all the way down to Andres Flores, who had, for me, his most effective attacking game as a Timber outside the time(s?) he scored that I don’t remember.

Bottom line, Vancouver spent the balance of tonight’s game trying to hang on to its lead instead of expanding on it. I might not be a Vancouver fan, but I feel reasonably in touch with the post I’d be writing if I was one. Suffice to say, it wouldn’t be pretty and the dirty words would be the least of it.

All the same, Vancouver has a lot of positives to celebrate, some burgeoning, some ongoing. With the latter, Doneil Henry played a great game tonight – right along with Vancouver’s defense in general. I have nothing to say or add beyond, hats off. On a deeper plus side, Ali Adnan was an insufferable pain in the ass all goddamn night. He’s not a risk-free player, as Moreira showed on the few occasions he got the better of him, but he wreaked havoc down Portland’s right tonight; he’s just so good at combining, dribbling, shooting, etc. Vancouver has something on its hand there. The same goes for Lass Bangoura, if here and there, and Lucas Venuto has crazy speed, which only makes it a bigger damn shame about the rest of his game. I can see this team coming together, but without really being sure when it’ll happen, and whether it’ll require the shedding and adding of personnel. This is why rebuilds are such nightmares, and why they should avoided.

All in all, would I have rather had the point – or God forbid, three points? No matter how implausible the latter feels, Hell, yes, and I wouldn’t have felt one tiny dripping of guilt by the end of the game. When it came to making the other team chase on defense, and regardless of what they had to show for it, Portland played the far sharper game. In terms of raw results, sure, this feels like a set-back. In terms of the team playing (1/2-to-2/3) well, this taps back to the better games of Portland’s late winning streak, and the noble losses (e.g., v the Los Angeles Galaxy and FC Dallas) that came before it. As much as I didn’t like how much the Timbers’ collective knees shook and spazzed over the game’s first 30 minutes, Portland found the front foot and took over the game. And, again, this was on the road. Without guaranteeing anything, I think the team is OK right now.

With the general thesis laid out, I’ll just close with some notes:

- His communication and/or other failures on the defensive side…um, aside, Moreira looks better in the attack every week.

- Yes, I came into this game wanting to see Portland experiment. They did not even remotely oblige the idea, never mind my curiosity. The closest they came was with giving Bill Tuiloma a crack at set-pieces (which, for the record, didn't make the stand-alone highlights). Well, that and they clearly played to him on set pieces and encouraged him to shoot. For the record, I am against none of that.

- A theory floated down from the broadcast booth, and maybe even reality, that the Timbers have adopted a strategy of subbing on Julio Cascante late in the game, a switch that allows Portland to drop into a 5-3-2 and kill off games. For what it’s worth, I don’t mind that idea either.

To wrap up, yes, Portland looked absolutely scrambled for most of the first half; hell, they played abysmally for 10 minutes loosely situated around the 20th minute mark. They also recovered and, ultimately, took over the game. I’m not declaring probably solved, and playoffs-ho from here, but the (interpreted) fact remains that Portland could have easily drawn this game and, when you really look at it, that really would have been the just result.

Counter-point: I run the Form Guide ULTRA for the exact, precise reason of erasing the entire idea of “could have” and “should have.” Related, and no less significantly, when I said Portland should play this game for broke, I totally neglected to look ahead to what’s next – e.g., away to the Houston Dynamo and away to the Philadelphia Union, aka, a pretty ice/fire-burdened Hell Week. And shit.

Till then….