Portland Timbers 2-1 Vancouver Whitecaps: An Easy Hazing

You need the neck, man. And the collarbones.

I’d made an agreement with myself to stop watching this one at the 80th minute until I saw the Portland Timbers pull a near-complete line-change. The Timbers were up 2-1, I knew how it ended and the Vancouver Whitecaps looked no more likely to steal the result than to earn it. All the same, if the preseason isn’t about watching the undercard talent, I don’t know why they do it. For better or worse – I’m inclined to better – the Timbers continued to pick off the Vancouver Whitecaps passes and generally keep the field tilted toward the ‘Caps’ goal after all those subs came on. Better, when the new guys came on, they seemed to hit the same angles on their passes and cut out Vancouver’s passes the same way; you might want a player with a different skill-set to come on to change the focus of the attack, but you want most of the team to play within the same system when they take the field, to look like they know how to play with others without thinking about it too hard. Portland did that on Sunday, and that’s promising.

Moreover, they could call in players like Jeremy Ebobisse, Julio Cascante and, yes, even Dairon Asprilla during that line change, guys with real MLS minutes and moments – and that’s before getting to semi-regular presences like Renzo Zambrano. Those late subs weren’t the first to come on – Marco Farfan replaced Jorge Villafana and Andy Polo replaced Yimmi Chara on the right at the half – and I think the Timbers need competition in those two spots as much as any other ones…now that I think about it, Portland has competition like that in a lot of spots, if with a fair number of clear favorites for each role.

Before going any further, I have a caveat about Vancouver: I don’t rate them for 2020, and I didn’t see anything in Sunday's game to change my opinion on that. Sure, they have some dangerous pieces: Ali Adnan (Jr.?) showed what he can do with a cross multiple times, including the one that created the ‘Caps well-worked goal. Several of their expected key players (e.g., Hwang Im-Beom, Markinovic and Lucas Cavallini) combined to make that happen, but outside that moment, they struggled to get the ball to Cavallini and the 'Caps struggled to get players around the ball anytime Cavallini had it. As much as Cavallini looked big, strong and effective, Vancouver seems to have found a head for its team (Cavallini) but without investing enough in a neck, or even a pair of collarbones. Even after that, the issues are global, whether it’s Derek Cornelius’ lightly bone-headed pair of gaffes (one of them, the penalty kick that Portland’s Felipe Mora had no need to sell to the ref), or the still impressive Yordy Reyna slicing through pockets of space (even if they lead to dead-ends). It’s not quite contempt, so much as an expectation that the Timbers will be one of several teams who will take advantage of Vancouver in the season ahead.

Because it’s preseason, I don’t need to dig too deep on anything, so kindly file all the above away as I tick through a handful of bullet points to close out.

The OGs and Old Rhythms
I thought all the big guns – e.g., Diego Chara, Diego Valeri, Sebastian Blanco and (yes) Larrys Mabiala – looked sharp for as long as they stayed on the field. They created openings, played out of pressure, repeatedly shifted the field against Vancouver (who, again, and for the last time, don’t look good), but you saw it too, didn’t you? A replay of the many broken attacks from the 2019 season, the bad habit of burying the ball too close to the end-line and forcing the team to…CROSS!

Going the other way, two of those pull-backs gave Blanco and Eyrk Williamson good shots on goal, and both of them should have put his shot away. A 4-1 win wouldn’t have insulted justice on Sunday by any means, but, again, and I swear to God this is the last time I say this, this is against a Whitecaps going through a never-ending rebuild.

More Ira
It’s possible the Timbers decided to push Jorge Moreira inside and around 25 yards from goal as a long-range option. Moreira fired two shots from range tonight, both of them credible (and one highly), but I also think Portland can benefit from forcing opposing defenses to cover that shot. To wrap up one thought, between Moreira’s cracks and the two shots mentioned above, Portland created real, replicable looks.

Andy Polo Didn’t Mean to Win the Game
C’mon, you know that’s right. Also, see above, man. It doesn’t matter.

My Greatest Solace, My Biggest Argument
Sunday’s game built on my understanding of what Cristhian Paredes does for Portland. The fact that he will never directly replace Chara is part of that. It’s a rare player who can do what Chara does, for one, but none of that is relevant to Paredes and/or his upside. At some point during the broadcast, Ross Smith noted (in his inscrutable accent) that Paredes had been too loose with the ball, and hadn’t really put his stamp on the game. While I disagreed with Smith’s point on “ball looseness,” I also couldn’t argue that he dominated the field on Sunday. I have two thoughts on that:

1) He didn’t have to, because Chara did; and

2) Paredes was damned solid when it came to ball security. He played out of pressure throughout the game, found the right pass often enough and, when the situation demanded, he found what I like to call a “smart pass” – i.e., the pass that not only breaks the pressure, but that also immediately unbalances the other team.

More Mora?
Mora (and Yimmi, if to a lesser extent) only had rare occasions to influence the game. While Mora made the most of his by drawing the penalty that opened the scoring, if he was involved with much of anything else, I missed it. It could have been that his runs made the openings that other players shot through, it could be I saw his combinations with Valeri and Blanco as saw more potential than threat, but I did find him interesting. Because he’s not as involved in the attack as Ebobisse is when he’s on the field, he’s a different look up there. I don’t know if I like it yet, and that’s the luxury of preseason sports: the games don’t matter, and that means you don’t have to care.

If it all comes together, Portland could have a lot of ways to hit opposing teams in 2020. All the same, I appreciated Sunday’s win for grounding me for the season ahead. The Timbers can play out of the back and into the attacking third as well as any team in MLS; it’s what they do, and don’t do, from there that defines them. It was too little on the “do” side last season and that conspired with a good-yet-brittle defense to kill them last season.

To sum it all up, I guess I’m still not seeing the path to glory, but I do believe they'll be competitive. The question is whether they’ll break toward great or something too closer to unspectacular.