Portland Timbers 2019 Season Review: A Requiem on a Season...Ahead of a Complicated Season

In the top 20 for "end of an era" and it's exactly as shapeless as I want it to be.

“I’m not expecting glory, but I’m also not bracing for disgrace. The goal Portland scored tonight shouted loudly back to the team that punched five, ten feet over its weight through the 2018 post-season. This team at its best really is something – and it has been for years. The concern is that it’s been too many of them.”
- Notes from a 2-1 loss to the Los Angeles Galaxy in LA, and 4h game of the season.

“As I see it, Portland Timbers 2019 never turned into a team to get excited about; it’s a team to support in the hopes of giving guys like Diego Chara, Diego Valeri, and, sure, Sebastian Blanco, and maybe even Jorge Villafana another happy memory before they check out.”
- Notes from the 2-2 road draw at Sporting Kansas City in the 2nd to last game of 2019.

A lot of games came, went and exhilarated or disappointed in the space between those two quotes, and the specifics about each of those games probably undercut whatever point I’m about to make, but it makes sense to me, so I’m rolling with it. The first quote above comes out of a match review of the third game in a five-game losing streak, one that happened at the very start of the season. The second quote comes out of notes on a third draw in three games of the not-doing-nearly-enough that typified the end of the Portland Timbers’ 2019 regular season. The first quote reflected a sort of conventional wisdom that the Timbers, a 2018 MLS Cup team with most of the same starters returning, would find their feet in the middle of a, frankly, awful fucking start to the 2019 season, and so everyone waited and, crucially, believed. The second quote came from the second-to-last game of the 2019 season, which gets at how long it took for people (including me) to accept that the Portland Timbers 2019 would not end in glory. Sebastian Blanco turned in one of his better performances of the latter half of 2019 in that game – all the regular performers did - but the Timbers as a whole couldn’t bring it home. They fell short at a time when they should have been doing the exact opposite.

If you put your money on the Portland Timbers to win MLS Cup (or even reach the semifinals) at any point after mid-September of this season, you’re the author of your own emotional damage; the writing was on the wall by then, and damned lurid. By which I mean, it was so obvious at that point that the only open question was when the Timbers would check out, not if.

Real Salt Lake 2-1 Portland Timbers: A Mirror to 2019

On seeing what I didn't want to see.

I don’t how many of you shifted in his/her seats in anticipation of extra time Saturday night, but I know I did. Sure, Real Salt Lake had absorbed the kitchen sink the Portland Timbers threw their way, but they didn’t show any meaningful signs of breaking through either. The play that won the game – i.e., RSL isolating Joao Plata on their left – had been tried before, and with just as many Timbers defenders buzzing around to cut off options. In the telling moment, however, Plata poked the ball across the top of Portland’s 18, Albert Rusnak had the wit ‘n’ savvy to leave the ball for Jefferson Savarino, and those split-second decisions put the sword to not just one of Portland's better recent spells, but also to the Timbers’ 2019 season.

That’s how it ended – 2-1 in RSL’s favor. With that, their season continues, while Portland starts facing the tough questions they could only push off for as long as they had games left to play. 2019 wound up as a…fairly fucked up year. Even if Timbers fans can't agree on what exactly went wrong, I think most people would agree that, Jesus preserve us, what a fucking mess. I’ll review the entire season later this week (Saturday?), and I’ll close this post with some questions that I hope in that review. To preview that, the second half of the 2019 season posed all kinds of questions to the future of the Portland Timbers team and/or franchise. I’ll do some reading and/or reminiscing and try to come up with something useful, all without promising that I can, but, I want to continue this wrap up of their final game with a question:

How the hell does a team of professional athletes forget how to do their collective jobs for 45 whole goddamn minutes?

I credited a couple Portland players for robustly stand-out starts – e.g., Cristhian Paredes and Bill Tuiloma both made a pair of stellar solo defensive plays each during the first half – but no one in the Timbers starting eleven looked prepared to do anything but disrupt and tackle over the opening 45 minutes. If any Timber found the proverbial friend during that first half, I either missed it or it didn’t matter. That failure lead to an avalanche of pressure falling on the Timbers defense (a decent example), and they handled all they could until Deimar Kreilach ghosted behind Larrys Mabiala’s shoulder and ahead of a ball-watching Bill Tuiloma to tap a free header past Portland’s ‘keeper, Steve Clark, who, to fill in all the blanks, played an aggressive (and intriguing) sweeper-‘keeper role, and to the point of stranding himself once or twice. RSL didn’t actually give him a ton to manage – too many of their shots dropped right into the ol’ breadbasket – but they had him dead to rights on both goals, and only the first one hurt real, real bad, even if they all count the same, and so on.

FC Cincinnati, 2019 in Review: A Puzzle and a Carousel

The problem, in WPA format.

For starters, I’ve never followed a team that suffered so much in one season. The world around me turned clockwise or counter-clockwise, but I’ve lead a charmed life when it comes to spectator sports.

And yet is was worse than that for FC Cincinnati in a lot of ways. In the big picture, they had their brightest moments early in the season; but for their March 30 loss to the Philadelphia Union, FC Cincy could have had the strongest start for an expansion team in Major League Soccer history. It probably wouldn't have mattered, but that game marked the turning point in Cincinnati’s 2019 season: after one more promising result – a 1-1 home draw versus Sporting Kansas City (that later provided both irrelevant and predictive for both teams, aka, more time for golf!) - they wouldn’t just lose, they’d lose in bunches: first five straight games, then six straight games, then four straight games, then four more. The end of the season looked a bit brighter, or at least fulfilled the theoretical promise of the team’s original roster construction – the defensive team they designed finally showed up, and that let them ruin a couple seasons (e.g., the Chicago Fire’s and Orlando City SC’s) – but it was too little and too late, on top of being basically unwatchable.

I’m going to (finally) close the chapter on FC Cincinnati’s inaugural 2019 season today. Rather than make anyone but the emotionally sturdiest people stick around till the end in the hope that I’ll have something bright, never mind helpful or insightful to say about 2020, I don’t. I expect hella turnover (as indicated by all the “Thank You __________” posts I see on the FC Cincinnati news page), and, between all the expected personnel turnover and a new coach (Ron Jans, whose current lease on (coaching life) expires December 2020), predictions can’t be anything but a mug’s game. Moving on…

I’ll close out with big-picture talking points, I'll name my personal team MVP…and, yeah, I think that’s about it, but I want to start by drafting a narrative for the 2019 season based on the notes I banged out through the season. And, golly, did production drop off at the end. And, frankly, so did my interest. As they say in France, allons y!

Portland Timbers 3-1 San Jose Earthquakes: The Best of All Possible Worlds, Emphasis on Possible

VAR, as I understand it.

The Portland Timbers lunged into the 2019 playoffs with the kind of result they were supposed to have stacked up like Benjamins over the course of, like, 50 home games in the second half of the 2019 season (was it long for you too? serious question). Key players showed up today, the mainstays really, and that defined the game. Larrys Mabiala, the Timbers’ biggest set-piece threat, scored after staying high on a recycled corner (and on a forward’s goal to boot). With the weight of carrying the attack on his shoulders, Sebastian Blanco delivered an energetic, even commanding performance; he polished it off with the free kick that stamped San Jose’s defeat, but I’d argue Blanco had his, and the Timbers’, best moment in the 53rd minute when he, 1) reversed a counter that could have spelled trouble for Portland, even doom; and 2) he capped it off by whipping a dangerous shot on goal.

Those two goals were enough to carry the Portland Timbers to a 3-1 home win, and into a first-round playoff bout, on the road against Real Salt Lake. The venue and opposition could be worse, really, given that Portland has won every single regular season game against RSL, home and away, for the past two seasons (yeah, yeah, it’s just four games, also, 10 gf, 2 ga in Portland’s favor), and I’ll take a longer look at all that during the preview. To get back to the game just played, Dairon “Mr. October” Asprilla, scored the goal that broke San Jose, and that, along with Mabiala’s night/goal and Blanco’s night/goal, is literally what the Portland Timbers need to get anywhere near a memorable season in 2019.

Part of me wants to attribute it all to a mind-state, one summed up in Blanco, who represented the Timbers at their best – i.e., defending, sure, but mostly attacking. That showed up, dramatically, in the boxscore, and mostly in combination. For instance, San dominated possession (nearly 6:4), but their comparatively low number of shots (they’ve posted much better numbers lately) answers the question of how much good all that possession did them. Personally, I recall some shots from San Jose, but nothing scary, certainly nothing sustained (i.e., all the sustaining went in the other direction), and the Timbers played the second half on the front foot – for which, notably, Diego Chara set the tone by single-handed cutting off two Earthquake attacks before they could develop (the man reads minds).

Before wandering aimlessly into Portland for an hour or two, I have some thoughts on San Jose. I didn’t see them find the same kind of openings that I saw them finding in those MLS-in-15 highlight clips…which means, that the Timbers cut that shit out. That's more more about Portland than the ‘Quakes, I guess, but good job, Timbers, regardless. Second, and this is what really decided the game, all it took to scramble San Jose was playing through that first line of pressure; even the goddamn broadcast booth noticed it. Based on what I saw in the highlights of their past four games, they scramble fairly capably when that happens - something that could mean that Portland’s better than your average team any time they can exploit space and momentum. In other words, sure, the ‘Quakes have lost a lot lately, but this loss still looked different, more NYCFC than Philadelphia, and so on…