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.

The harder reality: this wasn’t an unfair result. Take New England’s better, but ineffectual first half and throw them in the blender with about…call it 30 minutes of quality second-half play from Portland, add the dash of Ebobisse’s second goal (the dumb one) and a pinch of the Revs running down the game from the 85th minute forward, throw it in the oven, and I think a 2-2 draw would come out 8 times out of 10. The boxscore tells the same story: a very even game with the attacking edge going, notably and barely, to New England. The threat never truly went away, no matter how many times Timbers ‘keeper Steve Clark swatted it away.

Clark’s play – his first save, especially – was enough to make the thought of the Timbers pulling out a win plausible. Clark sure as hell wasn’t at fault for the draw - he was left for dead on the first goal, and close to stopping the second – but he fell victim to the breakdown of Portland’s brittle confidence along with the rest of the team. After outright dominating the first 10 minutes of the second half, and keeping New England honest for most of the rest of it, the Revs broke through on a counter at the 87th minute. They piled on the pressure from there – even forcing another (easier) save out of Clark – but Portland had some spells of passing and pinned the ball in the Revs’ end for a minute or two as the clock ticked to expiration, and you got to the point where I decided it would take something weird for this game to end in anything but a Timbers win.

Related, and I can’t emphasize this enough: do not start composing your wrap-up tweets before the game ends. Jinxes are real, people. And I apologize, especially, for typing one that included the word “win.”

So, that’s the whole thing: a deserved goal for each team and a barely deserved goal for each team, and the game ends in a draw. The more time I sit with it, the only thing that really pisses me off about it is that Portland had solidified its defense in the second half. New England had had a field day passing through Portland in the first half (NOTE to the people who run the Chalkboard in the boxscore (e.g., the soccer field with removable arrows): I don’t know how key passes work; I also doubt you could explain them in a way I wouldn’t argue with), and that had a lot to do with a gap between the defensive midfielders and the back four during the first half. The Timbers dropped the midfield against the defense in the second half - especially once they had a lead to defend - and the Revs sputtered against it in a way that Portland fans should have recognized. That came apart on New England’s second goal, obviously, and I’ve been an argument with myself since the game ended as to whether Portland should have just stayed compact and forced the Revs to break them down, or whether they should have tried to keep the ball all the hell away from their own goal, even risking possession to do it. And, to introduce a strained connection...

What does making the playoffs mean when a team looks like this? To pick up the above thought, I love it when teams can close out a game with possession. Knocking it around like that, making the opposition chase the ball, the game, and the clock all at once? Confident teams do that. Portland did that at mid-season when they closed out the long road-trip. Watching games back then, I struggled to keep up with the apparent sixth sense among the Timbers line-up, when some kind of spider-sense let each player know where to play the next pass the second it touched his foot. Fans believed the long stretch of home games at the end of this season laid out like a red carpet into the 2019 playoffs for a reason: it matched the eye-test. Until it didn’t.

And that’s the theme for tonight: Mabiala had a great game till he didn’t; Jorge Villafana had a great game till he didn’t; Cristhian Paredes had a great game till he didn’t, etc. The larger point is, I can’t even sort of imagine the Timbers playing the style they did in the middle of the season. And it shows: their defensive posture changed dramatically between there and here; where the Timbers used to plant its foot on the back line, absorb the pressure, then push out; now, they just absorb pressure and...hope for the best(?). And that’s where I want to close out the thought about what it means to make the playoffs in either this particular state, or something similar to the hypothesis.

The Timbers attack has been…well, crap lately. Shit, in fact. I’m guessing there are a lot of theories as to why (and I’ll get to mine), but I think the big picture argument that most people would agree on is that they don’t know how to play through an opponent that’s not stretched or around one that’s compact. The solution to the former means hitting opposing defenses in transition or getting a lot better with either runs and through-balls or one-or-two-touch-street-ball shit to break down a team centrally. But it’s getting around that feels like the bigger problem right now. First, sure, Portland got around the Revs defense a few times, but without feeling either consistently dangerous, or like they knew how to replicate it. And here’s the big defect I see on that:

Both the fullbacks (generally, Jorge Moreira and Jorge Villafans) and the outside midfielders (generally, Diego Valeri or Sebastian Blanco) stop their runs near the top, outside corner of the opposition’s defensive third. They almost never try to overlap, never mind overload, which means that, so long as the defense stays compact and minds its marks, Portland’s players will be crossing into attacking players who are standing to receive the ball. Portland does better with early crosses – at least the timing’s good(!) – but that’s often a 1-v-2 in the defense’s favor. As such, Portland usually tries to isolate (most often) Moreira, Blanco or Villafana on the weak side where they have time to fire in a cross (and don’t get me started on Moreira’s maddening habit of teeing up his crosses). It’s occasionally effective (twice tonight!), but getting six goals in eight games ain’t great – and it hardly improves when I raise the sample size to 10 games (when it becomes 12 goals in 10 games, for a whopping 1.2 goals per game). Portland is, for lack of a better word, predictable – especially if you can take away transition and force them to play through a compact defense.

To enlarge the theory to one big thought to watch for: what if teams have figured out how to defend Blanco and Valeri? Think about in the context of where they often receive the ball and what they do when they have it. And….just think about it for a while.

At any rate, that’s a result people rightly call brutal. A must-win you don’t win, and with the confidence all wrong and at least a faint taste of getting burned, even if you probably didn’t. The really painful thing, a penalty kick felt like the only way that Portland would tie the game or, gods forbid, lose it. Steve Clark alone seemed to have the scrappiness to spare. Until he didn’t.