Portland Timbers 1-0 Nashville SC: Malaise & Balance

Get out those sweaters people, and turn down the thermostat.

Unless I’m mistaken, the Portland Timbers’ 1-0 win over Nashville SC had exactly two defining moments. The first happened when Diego Valeri stumbled into the on-side pocket where Andy Polo’s more alert than good header found him; Valeri finished the moment in a manner befitting someone to whom a team pays the big bucks, and that was literally the game. The other happened when Steve Clark tipped Anibal Godoy’s rifle-shot around his far post. Between them, those moments provided Portland’s margin of victory, and, good God, no, it wasn’t fun to watch. Children fidgeted, I tell you...

If a person argued that nothing really happened on either side of those two moments, that person would not be wrong. That person is me. Sure, Walker Zimmerman came close at the very deathiest of the death, but he nodded the ball wide; at the end of the first half, and quite possibly in injury time once again, Randall Leal cut his way into an opening…and then he fired his shot so close to Clark that he didn’t even have to move to save it…

…with that, I believe I’ve covered all points of interest. Thank you for attending today’s tour, just promise that you’ll never speak favorably about it to anyone, any time, ever. Don't encourage this shit, for the love of all that's holy.

This was an awful game, from Portland’s POV in particular. They scored on one of three shots fired, and one of the two they put on goal. For their part, Nashville put up a normal and reasonable number of shots, but I’ve listed the only two that really counted above…and, dear god in heaven, can that really be it?

The grim reality is fairly straightforward: based on the available evidence, Portland will struggle to get even one point out of any game in which they allow the opposition to score. Nashville couldn’t score, and that let the one, beautifully fluky goal Valeri fired in stand up. My memory matches the box score perfectly, in that I can’t recall even one more decent move by the Timbers outside Felipe Mora’s…competent (but no better) shot on Nashville’s goal. To wrap up what I’m getting at, yes, the attack looks that bad right now.

Even so, my one, clear memory of this game will be Portland’s perfectly, drearily executed banks of four in the defense. On the one hand, that’s the coaching staff responding to an absolutely real crisis at the back. Portland has positively bled goals over the wretched duration of 2020, so what can a responsible coach do besides batten down the hatches? Best case, this was Giovanni Savarese ordering his charges to sacrifice everything, down all the way to even simple, decent entertainment and fucking aesthetics (man!), and it’ll be something he resorts only when the Timbers need to close out a game…one in which they’ve run up the score 4-0 in the 60th minute, and that gives the young, T2 players on the fringe of the roster the chance to play against 10 desperate professionals, too many of them watching the viability of their careers as professionals evaporate…

…but we’re all still waiting on Portland to reliably score two goals in one game, never mind one of them. And, no, at time of writing, I don’t see how that doesn’t get unfucked. That point aside, I hope I got all the “no’s” and “don’ts” arranged correctly, but all I’m really saying is that the Timbers seem to exist in a space in which it looks like they can either defend or attack, and neither of them very well, but, no, they can't do both in the same game. With today's game behind them, it gets a little/arguably worse too: I’ve avoided the, “and it’s an expansion team” narrative for an entire goddamn page of a Word document, but Nashville is an expansion team. And that’s worth an interlude.

On a top-line level, Nashville convinced me as a plausible team. The same goes for Hany Mukhtar, their major off-season signing; he may not have changed the game today, but he fired off signals that hinted at what he might do so later. The whole “three shots, two shots on goal” thing, and on the road, gives a favorable report on Nashville’s defense…or maybe that’s just Portland’s sheer, embarrassing shittiness when it comes to creating chances. The main point is, file both those ideas away and see which one holds up better over time.

Bottom line, Nashville SC never looked like victims out there and, from the Timbers’ point of view, that’s a problem. More than anything else, Portland very visibly does not have its shit sorted at the moment, and that’s the simple short answer to every question that anyone can ask about what’s wrong with the Timbers right now - i.e., they don't have their shit sorted out at the moment.

I want to end with the very specific anecdote that inspired the title I chose. Somewhere around the 10 minute mark of this game, Sebastian Blanco played a short pass to a Nashville player, and cleanly enough to make you think he didn’t see that player at all. That’s fine, mistakes happen, but that same player broke up field toward Portland’s goal with options running in front of him. Blanco chased that player for a while, maybe 10 yards, maybe 20 (but probably not), and then he very visibly gave up, stopped running and started watching.

I don’t blame Blanco for that moment. The Nashville player – and I assume it was Eric Miller (e.g., the same guy that would hip-check Blanco to the ground earlier) – was visibly faster, so Blanco would never catch him. The play ended with a shot, not a particularly good one – I’m pretty sure it was blocked before Clark had a chance to get involved - but a shot all the same. The deeper point is, one bad pass lead to that breakdown, and not even the super-structure behind that – e.g., The Flying Chara Brothers (Diego and Yimmi), plus Polo – looked in any real way prepared to kill the counter before that shot. On the one hand, no, Nashville didn’t create many quality chances; on the other, even with the Timbers playing the most pinched, compact banks of four I’ve seen them play in a while, they still gave up space in and around their own 18. Not many, and more than the box score indicates, certainly, but, when you’re a team that can’t really afford to go down even one goal, that’s your biggest problem right there, forever and always, or at least until further notice.

All the above is intended to underline how precarious Portland looks this far into the Major League Soccer 2020 regular season. The three points are nice, no matter how fortunate they feel, but it’s worth returning to the full meaning of the situation in which Portland finds itself:

As I see it, the Timbers have a certain ceiling in 2020; the real question is how they choose to get there. The contrast between those two most extreme poles are embodied in the starting right fullback, Jorge Moreira, and his back up, Chris Duvall. In a choice that’s familiar to every Democratic, or even Democratic-leaning voter over the past…oh, 40 years, this is a choice between trying to win games (i.e., the free-wheeling, danger-prone Moreira option) and trying not to lose them (e.g., the Duvall option). Yes, you know the 2020 equivalents, so I'll leave it there.

For what it’s worth, I think both players – and/or, frankly, both mindsets – pose risks large enough to keep the Timbers out of the playoffs. Under the Duvall Option, Portland risks being the kind of team that will get a point at most out of any game when the opposition scores. Under the Moreira Option, meanwhile, the question becomes whether or not Portland can outscore the opposition. I know, personally, which approach I’d like to watch; trouble is, that’s not necessarily the same approach that will get Portland to the playoffs. Or vice versa. See? Voting is hard, dammit.

I’m happy for the three points and all, if for no better reason than that the idea of losing them is too terrible to contemplate. At the same time, I can’t avoid the idea that the Timbers only pulled this off because the tip of Nashville’s “attacking spear” ends with David Accam and Dominique Badji. It goes without saying that there are better teams in the West than Nashville. And the question there is whether or not the Duvall Option will even work against those better teams…

…and, yes, I know that all the above entirely sets aside the question of whether or not Moreira can even play, but this is less about Duvall and Moreira than the mindsets each player embodies.

Just tell me it gets easier next week. Who does Portland have? Oh. Well….