Montreal Impact 2-1 Portland Timbers: Dead Ends & Futures

The image feature is fucked up. Here are birds of paradise getting sexy.

What good is a player who is only good every October? I’m asking for Dairon Asprilla, a player the Portland Timbers have carried on its roster since…hold on…wow, 2015. For all his lung-busting effort, he’s scored fewer goals than you think, and over more performances than you realize. God willing, he’s killing it every day with T2, but, without further excavation, I have only his numbers with the Timbers’ first team to go with, and one has to wait a while before having anything to count…something like being in prison and having one day last six months.

And, wow. Wow, wow, wow. Lucas Melano’s numbers are barely better. Even with the year off, yikes.

The Timbers gambled on its youth tonight against the Montreal Impact. The starting eleven included one regular starters (Cristhian Paredes), another guy who’s slipping out of the regular rotation (Jeff Attinella), and one patch-starter (Julio Cascante), maybe two (Marco Farfan). Every other guy Portland fielded has, at most, a start or two with the first team next to his name. They wound up losing 1-2, both to Montreal, and to a freakish, wonderful goal. Honestly, I take off both hats off to Orji Okwonwko’s winner, because that’s, at best, a 1-in-50 kind of goal, a Bird of Paradise, if you will…

…but on the level of argument, it took Montreal pulling that out of their collective asses to win this game. So, yeah, not all is lost, and that’s why I didn’t go with my original, more arresting sub-title, “I Hate this Team And I’ll Never Watch Them Again.” It was a joke, people…

The game started all right – call it 10-15 minutes – before degenerating into a conspiracy between the Timbers giving away the ball and Montreal winning nearly every duel that sent all the traffic toward Portland’s goal. The Timbers started the second half stronger and, when they equalized via the famous trio of Loria-to-Cascante-to Conechny (OK not famous locally, but do any baseball fans get the reference?). Portland looked capable of God-knows-what after that goal, and they played…relatively even with Montreal for the rest of the game, even if, after Okwonwko scored Montreal’s second goal, they never really looked like coming back into it. All the same, and generally allowing for the reality that Montreal’s B+ team narrowly out-played Portland’s B- team (in Montreal), some players looked ready for this level, while others did not.

Let’s start with Conechny, a player who, in the end, arguably made amends for an earlier near-assist for Montreal. He’s young – just 21 years old still – and I’ve seen some moments from him, e.g., a line-breaking dribble against…LA (probably?), tonight’s well-taken goal, and a handful of good passes tonight. Trouble is, he mis-hits his good ideas too often to function as a useful play-maker from any area on the field, and his decision-making runs two ticks too long too often. Sure, he’s young, do you know how young Asprilla was when he first joined the Timbers? He was either 22 or 23. Sometimes the script never changes, except in October.

I’m going to gloss over Melano’s tenure as lightly as possible, and on the grounds that it hurts him every time he doesn’t produce one hell of a lot more than it hurts me. The same goes for Asprilla, or any other player: I hate seeing any player stumble over time, because that’s watching a dream die in slow motion.

On the other, completely unsentimental side, I don't need to see any of those guys play or sub for the Timbers first team going forward. To push one more player closer to the fire – and to review/list, that’s Melano, Asprilla (yes, even with the October thing), and Conechny – I saw far too little out of Eryk Williamson to sell me on another chance. He had two bad touches, plus one bad/sloppy pass for every good one (but at least one was quite good), but, more than anything else, he just wasn’t present. Williamson was a walking definition of a USL-level utility player out there.

Who knows? Maybe all those players get better with better players – i.e., the Timbers regulars - around them and my response is, of course they do…well, except Melano and Asprilla. I mean, on the evidence…OK, last dig.

Tonight, I liked the players who looked comfortable without the safety net. In fact, I’m going to start with the one I think most people won’t buy: Claude Dielna. He was loose out of the back here and there, and you definitely saw a lot of him tonight, but that had everything to do with Dielna, a centerback, getting stranded wide on the left over and over - and, against a faster player, he lost a couple footraces. Without knowing for sure, I’m guessing that resulted from playing Farfan higher to generate offense. Or maybe it was Conechny failing to track back (but, if that’s the case, where the hell did Farfan go)? At any rate, Dielna bobbled the full plate he handled here and there, but he coped overall, and the defense, as a whole, put in a decent shift. I don’t trust him more than Tuiloma, or maybe even Cascante, but he’s not gonna kill you, at least not all the time. (What’s he cost? Dunno, but that’s a relevant and separate issue.)

After Paredes, who I appreciate a little more after every third outing, what I saw out of Marvin Loria andl, Renzo Zambrano impressed me. All three looked very much in place tonight – i.e., up to the level, and with some idea of how to influence a game. Those are the three guys pushing their way into the first team and, to get all optimistic about things, they look some version of ready…that can only be revealed over time. Sorry to caveat that to death, but longevity is the only test that really matters in professional sports, so I can’t bring myself to declare those three players starters. At the same time, I feel comfortable enough with all three that I won’t blink to see them in a starting eleven. They can change that, no question, but I’ll make a case for them until they do something to make me stop.

Overall, the Timbers shouldn’t sweat this loss. I’m even inclined to think it served a purpose, or a variety of them: resting starters, for one, but why not test-drive your depth in a game you can afford to lose? Going the other way, the exercise is/was only useful to the extent that it revealed the ready-for-prime-time players. If that’s your starting point, I guess you rate this game according to what you got out of watching the T2 guys take on a middling and picked-over version of a team that’s, somewhat mysteriously, 2nd in the Eastern Conference, on the evening of June 26, 2019. And yet, there they are.

So, what was this result? And that’s from either team’s perspective. Given the whole thing with the Timbers starting T2, anything but a win would have embarrassed Montreal – or at least should have. It’s harder to measure from Portland’s side and people will draw the line between success and failure differently. When I watch Loria and Zambrano, I see players who could make some starters sweat; better still, I see a path to fielding a competitive team for the next three, four years.