Sporting Kansas City 2-2 Portland Timbers: Tumbling Dice

Feels disturbingly like the best option....go on, Dairon.

Full disclosure: I had to check out of the Portland Timbers 2-2 draw away to Sporting Kansas City around the 60th minute. I don’t use “had to” lightly either. You see, we enrolled late in this bowling league, but the week before we joined, a guy with two open spots invited two dudes to play with him and his girlfriend, only we bowled with the guy and his girlfriend in Week 2, but agreed that his invitees had first dibs, so we stayed home Week 3 to see what happened, only they didn’t show up, then we post-bowled the Tuesday after, at which point they told us they gave the guy an ultimatum that, if we showed up, we’re in (or something like that). So, with them holding that spot for us, and the guy’s friends kicked to the curb, how would it have looked had I not shown up? The disrespect would have broken the Bowler’s Code, which I assume is real, without investigation.

Real-world shit aside, my top-line comment about the Timbers is that they don’t look a whole lot better than Sporting KC, and look where they are. My second comment is, Jesus Christ, what a fucking mess. I’m not just talking about Alan Chapman’s officiating either, but the entire four-team mud-wrestling Battle Royale in a steel cage over a pit of rabid caimans that will cut the last two Western Conference teams from the 2019 MLS Playoffs. The Timbers have the edge, if only by virtue of having one more point (46) than FC Dallas (45) and two points more than the San Jose Earthquakes (44), aka, the team they can fuck up three ways to Sunday on “Decision Day brought to you by some company with hostile customer service,” but, sure, a draw at home against the ‘Quakes could see them through – it’d put San Jose at powerful risk, if nothing else - but wouldn’t you rather see your hometown team whip one of those wicked, Fast-and-Furious 180’s and drive into the playoffs with the car pointing the right fucking way?

I don’t see anything so stirring happening, either; Portland has been your biological dad taking you to the restaurant you loved four years ago for a couple months now. In the same vein, I’ve lowered my expectations for Portland to them showing up and trying, and seeing what that gets them. It’s been a lot of draws lately, and yet they’re still (narrow) favorites for the playoffs, which means the Timbers’ plan sucked a little less than the teams below them.

Portland Timbers 2-2 New England Revolution: A Must-Win You Don't Win

Is that a curtain you can walk through or just a set?

I’ve never seen extended comments from Jeremy Ebobisse, so that post-game interview was a personal first. I’m not entirely sure how to describe the moment, but to call that the last honest interview I’ve seen. Still waters and all that.

That’s what felt good on a night that ended with a kind of bitterness that it would take eating, like, ten whole grapefruit rinds to fully experience. Ebobisse scored a beautiful goal, one that came after a couple minutes of pressure from the Portland Timbers had the New England Revolution defense scrambling badly enough to lose him. He later scored what can only be described as a dumb goal, a sort of lunge-sprawl toward an incoming ball that looped in off his extended right foot. For all that I think he followed through consciously, Ebo couldn’t score the same goal again in 200 tries – one’s body simply doesn’t do…that in the normal course of coordination (honestly, if the rest of us so much as attempted it, we’d just collapse to the ground and wet our pants and cry) – but that only made up for the increasingly creative ways he’s found to fail to fire a shot toward (or next to) goal in recent games (the touch he gets in that highlight reminds one of the insane shit he does periodically). Well, Ebobisse found the goal tonight – and twice. And then everything else fell the fuck apart.

The Revs equalized on a late, deserved penalty call when Larrys Mabiala’s shirt-tug invited Wilfried Zahibo to very theatrically fall down. With that – plus an earlier (ominous) goal from Gustavo Bou – those two goals cancelled out Ebo’s brace, and the game ended 2-2. Larrys did, in fact, have plenty of shirt (saw the stretchy that proved it), so the only suspect thing about the call was the timing – i.e., the earliest phases of the 95th minute, after referee Jair Maruffo called for just four minutes of stoppage time. I don’t think there’s an argument to win in there, but feel free to make one. I wouldn’t have blinked about the clock running to 96 minutes, but for the Revs’ goal. If memory serves, New England won a corner right around the 94th, then another immediately after that, so it wasn’t crazy letting it run that high. It just ended with shit hors d’oeuvres for an entire fan-base who’s eaten their fill of them.

OK, that’s the end of jokes involving bodily functions. Last one. Promise.

Portland Timbers 0-0 Minnesota United FC: Mediocre Meets Good

That's the best image I could find for "curse." Infrastructure?

The Portland Timbers have scored just 1.0 goal per game in their past 10 games. They just crossed over into playing sub-.500 ball (4-5-1), the excuse they were playing tough teams at home dried up with games against DC United (a loss) and the New York Red Bulls (a loss), and it continued today against Minnesota United FC, even if the excuse was better. They haven’t scored at home in three whole goddamn games, and that makes the following question the only game in town: are the Timbers cursed or are they just not good enough in 2019?

Today’s goal-less/soul-less draw at home against MinnesotaUnited FC gave state’s evidence for cursed. Portland created real chances (shit, more than I thought too) and, to be clear, most of their best chances were not among the 11 shots on goal, if for no better reason than Cristhian Paredes’ header off the post doesn’t count as a shot on goal, also, make your subjective metrics better, dammit. To reframe the issue, and properly: Portland created chances and opportunities just fine; they just don’t put them way. Also, yes, the issue of making bad decisions, or piss away a half decade before making a bad decision (see, Polo, Andy) plays into the whoa-whoa-woes the Timbers have to wrestle to ground down the short neck of 2019.

And, to circle back to the question/issue left hanging at the end of the first paragraph, Portland has played every one of the past 10 games at home, except the loss on the road to this same Minnesota team at the beginning of that 10-game stretch. So, that’s four points of six to Minnesota to bookend the beginning of Portland’s demise(?), and that makes a case that Portland has found its natural habitat at the fringes of the red velvet rope that divides teams in and out of the MLS playoffs…which, again, is the opposite of exclusive. More teams still make it into the MLS playoffs than don’t, and that's the real-world measure of how badly you have to be doing things – and globally – to miss out. The bar is low and the Timbers’ chances of failing to clear it get higher with every result that falls short of three points.

FC Cincinnati 0-0 Chicago Fire: What Should Have Been (And Are You Thankful?)

The only through-line.

Well, FC Cincinnati fans, that was the kind of game this team was built to deliver, a safety-first grind that put a wall of defenders between the opposition and your goal. It was effective to a point – Cincy got the slow-death 0-0 draw, didn’t it? – and it was entertaining to a lower point. It lacked for moments, clearly – see the abbreviated list of “highlights” – but it provided little gasps of drama here (e.g., the five-minute flurry by the Chicago Fire after the 60th minute) and there (the last 10 minutes), and either team could have taken it…

…it fits the 2019 season for both teams that neither of them did. Still, if I had to hand out a trophy, it would go to FC Cincinnati, who had the lower bar of achievement to leap over. At this point, Cincy can only tie the single-season record for losses. Can I get a "what what?" or “huzzah” or something?! (What is the sound of enthusiastic Ohioans?)

There’s not a lot to unpack, fortunately, because I’ve got a maddening match to watch in just over an hour (go, Portland!), so I will keep this really brief. The Fire remains three points behind the New England Revolution, the only team in the Eastern Conference they have any chance of leaping over – and the Revs have a game in hand. With allowances for miracles, I’d call their chances doomed in every sense but the mathematical. Cincinnati, of course, has nothing better to do than to pick up as many scraps of their dignity as possible before the season ends. Their only real loss on the afternoon came when Kendall Waston picked a suspension in the next game for that bullshit yellow card on Nemanja Nikolic. Waston’s elbow grazed Nikolic’s chin at most, and Cincinnati still has avoiding the single-season record for goals allowed to play for.

To wrap up Chicago, they looked the better team throughout, but barely. Their best attacks came mostly from early crosses (so many crosses, and when the crossed to Cincy’s defense once it condensed, forget about it), and Maikel van der Werff and Matthieu Deplagne cleaned up the worst of those. Przemyslaw Frankowski and Nico Gaitan did their best to keep them going, but it was pretty damn headless, or Cincinnati’s defenders made it so. If I had to pass on anything from Chicago’s performance to pass down to the youth, I’d go with Bastian Schweinsteiger playing out of pressure; so composed, even elegant, that everything around him looked a little Keystone Cops. The biggest shocks included how far Aleksandar Katai has regressed and the fact that Chicago can’t field anyone better than Brandt Bronico. More than anything else, the Fire needed a player to put his laces through the ball. They never found him, or he never found the ball. Moving on...

Portland Timbers 0-2 New York Red Bulls: Short (Pfft!), Sharp and Disappointed

Happy Halloween, motherfuckers!! (aka, how crosses work).

I want to start with one thought, something I feel escapes fans from time to time.

If your accountant fucks up your taxes, you complain, yes? If the kitchen sent you something you didn’t order and it’s cold, you send that wrecked fucking garbage back to the kitchen and demand an apology, right?

When a ref calls a bad game, you lose your whole goddamn mind and tell him you wish he would die in a fiery crash tomorrow with his whole worthless, myopic family, don’t you?

Professional athletes are not sacred spirit creatures. They are people who are hired to do a job. When they fail at the job, there is nothing wrong with pointing it out.

When you insult them personally, or, for example, wish them bodily harm (as in the refereeing example above; i.e., neither say nor think such things), yes, you have crossed the line and, as MLS says, don’t cross the line.

The point is, there’s nothing wrong with saying this player or that hasn’t done well for some time or, to borrow a point from someone else (@isaacfharris), that a coach isn’t making the proper adjustments. Now, to tonight’s game. Bullet-point style.

Portland Timbers 0-1 Portland Timbers (Fine, DC United)

These don't have a snooze button. There is no snooze button.

Well, are we all prepared to pretend Thanksgiving dinner came off all right this week?

[Ed. - Fwiw, the walkout by the Emerald City Supporters was the right response in my book; funny things could happen when MLS decides to make the ambience more appealing to right-wing supporters. I’d love to stop talking about this shit too, but here’s the thing: it never came up until the league started enforcing the ban.]

A fairly experimental Portland Timbers line-up came up against a fiercely organized DC United defensive set-up – especially in the second half – and the Timbers mostly peppered it with blows both glancing and wayward (looking at you, Jorge Moreira). Forced to choose between shooting into a thicket and trying to get around it, the Timbers tried the latter to fairly useless effect. On the plus side, Portland scored all the goals today – even the one the entire goddamn refereeing apparatus failed to spot (keep bringing the quality product, MLS) – they just scored them for DC, and so the game ended 0-1 against the Timbers, who no longer look like the 2nd-in-the-West “lock” more than a few of us dreamed of earlier this season…y’know, before some great thinkers decided to complicate the enthusiasm.

DC deserves credit for playing in the first half, because they didn’t do that so much of it in the second half. They didn’t have to either – see Paul Arriola’s near-miss on Andres Flores’ gift – because they looked ready and capable of keeping Portland out of the goal for another 250 minutes.

Portland held the upper hand throughout, but Bill Tuiloma’s own-goal at the 25th minute rightly tripped the “oh, shit alarm.” With the way they defend (well), a DC lead always had the potential to steal a result, and DC had found ways to unsettle Portland’s defense before the goal – e.g., Paul Arriola carving a seam up the gut. The goal followed from Ulises Segura getting around some scrambling defenders and hitting the cross that Tuiloma chipped in. The halftime whistle felt like hitting the snooze button, but the sense the Timbers would ever wake up slipped away bit by bit, starting with whistle to start the second half sounded. First came an awkward back-pass, then came Eryk Williamson’s yellow card; these were not the thoughts and motions of a locked-in team. The field generally tilted in Portland’s favor from there, but, hard as I hoped for it, I stopped expecting them to win around the 70th minute, and figured they’d fall short of a draw when Tomas Conechny’s fresh Argentine energy fizzled against the same low-block force-field that Portland could only cross into and over with toddler-like power and precision. That was around the 80th minute, but probably a little after.

Montreal Impact 0-1 FC Cincinnati: Taking Care of (Super-Belated) Business

Elvis would be super-belatedly proud.

I won’t pretend that was enjoyable. My phone became infinitely more interesting around the 20th minute, but I more or less hung in there (hanged in there?), with allowances for prep-cooking and my cat doing something vaguely interesting. FC Cincinnati was reasonably good for its 1-0 win over the Montreal Impact. In Montreal, too. I’m not sure that matters, because neither of these teams has a future that extends beyond October 6.

When Allan Cruz stabbed that lucky bounce home about halfway through the first minute, the only relevant question became whether Cincy could hold out for the 90+ minutes ahead (also, against pretty much anyone). Cincinnati answered by clogging the middle with a low-block, which L’Impact got worse at figuring it out as the minutes ticked higher. They found Orji Okwonwko on the weak-side a couple times in the first half, but he was offside or sloppy in the defining moment, and things generally descended into hope-and-a-prayer crosses by the end of the game, Ignacio Piatti looking about a month too early (for him) and too late (for Montreal), and a lot of aimless possession by Saphir Taider and Samuel Piette. Montreal never looked particularly threatening, so…yay, Cincinnati!

Cincinnati ground out this game and, based on the attack last night, and recent games generally, that looks more or less like the entire tool-kit. They don’t have an attacking upside to save them. Even with most of the season gone, you still see Cincy players make runs to the same space (Darren Mattocks is freakin’ awful about crowding the left), and don’t even get me started about transition – e.g., at least two breaks forward, and with numbers in Cincinnati’s favor. In both those moments (and maybe a couple others), the runs came straight out of a family Thanksgiving Day “Turkey Bowl” after “first dinner” and the first fifth of whiskey, and the final pass referenced neither run, so, no, I wouldn’t call transition Cincy’s long suit either.

They scored first, though, and that’s all that mattered last night. Well, that and Przemyslaw Tyton pawing away a rare, truly clean shot on goal by Montreal. Had that gone in – or even had Joe Gyau’s stumble into Bacary Sagna been called as a PK (I would have called it) – Cincinnati could have drawn, or, god forbid, lost this game.

Notes on a Weekend Without Soccer: A Position Statement

The past couple weeks, maybe even the last month, have been the strangest and most uncomfortable in my 23 years of following Major League Soccer. More precisely, the last three years have been annoyingly fucked up and the proximate cause is Trumpism. Anyone who finds that argument unfair, or just plain wrong…just stop. You’re wrong. Politics has invaded every inch of our increasingly cursed lives since Trump took office. Speaking as someone who has read and tracked politics for as long as I could process it, it has never been like this, not in my lifetime. The country is arguing very loudly about the kind of country it wants to be and the kids are, naturally, freaking out.

And that sucks. It’s getting harder and harder to find spaces where you don’t need to think about our visibly panicked and confused president, or the people who think he’s the greatest thing to happen to this country since…what the moon landing? Joseph McCarthy? Some mythic past a critical mass of people digested from television and now confuse for their own lives? The positions are so profoundly entrenched that people don’t even operate from the same reality.

That makes creating neutral spaces very tempting, but also impossible. And, to expand the conversation, the people who are grievously pissed about MLS trying to chase politics out their stadiums should consider how much that decision follows the same logic of trying to make public spaces secular, so as to not favor one religion over another. Personally, I’m delighted with religion-free public spaces (I’m merely agnostic on my more spiritual days), but tens of millions of Americans think that’s why the country is going to hell. As such, they keep fighting for prayer in public schools and singing the national anthem, like, way more often than I think they should.

The rest of this both carries that word “fighting” forward and also quietly lays down in a corner. Americans who wanted to keep God at the center of public life never stopped pushing to make it happen. And, when they didn’t get there, they created work-arounds, some of them frankly, racist – e.g., opting out of the public schools where their kids should attend, because fuck community if it means sharing the classroom with them (more on that). To me, that’s arguing that some Americans are more equal than others, and I’ve got no time for that bullshit, if you don’t like it, fucking pull on your big boy pants and improve those classrooms.

FC Dallas 3-1 FC Cincinnati: Getting Dragged by History

Like that, but a painful reality and not a well-staged stunt.

Yesterday evening, FC Cincinnati took three unwelcome strides toward raising the bar for goals allowed in a single season, plus another one toward the single-season record number of losses. With six games left on their 2019 schedule, they’re just eight goals allowed shy of one record and, comfortingly(?), five losses away from the record for losses. What’s left to say after that one besides, do your best to stay out of the record books, Cincy. Fail less often or more gently?

After playing FC Dallas to a relatively even first half – they finished with six shots each, even if Dallas held a 3-1 edge on shots on goal – the game fell apart one piece at a time to ultimately end in a 3-1 win for Dallas. First came two goals three minutes apart – the first a turnover that caught Greg Garza too far upfield thinking Cincy would keep the ball, the second an early cross to a wide-open Zdenek Ondrasek outside Justin Hoyte – then came Kekuta Manneh’s moment of dumbassery and subsequent ejection. Whatever thin hope lingered from Emmanuel Ledesma’s 64th-minute penalty kick (and it was a good call and a rare coherent attack for Cincy) evaporated in the split-second when Manneh shoved his hand into Bryan Acosta’s face, off the ball, and almost certainly provoked, but, when you suck as thoroughly as Cincinnati does, a cool head is just about all you have left.

Before anyone assumes they had a chance, Cincy added just one shot/shot on goal to their first half total – even with a full allotment of players on the field for 30 minutes of the second half. There are no positives left, only the hope of avoiding record-breaking negatives. COYFCC, etc.

Is it worth mulling over what might have been when it clearly didn’t happen? Did a scenario ever exist when a healthy, more sober/tuned-in Fanendo Adi lead a basically competent FC Cincinnati attack? Could having Greg Garza for the entire season would have added a goal or two, or kept four or five goals out? What if Fatai Alashe remained healthy all season? A question hangs over every position and the only answer is, none of it happened.