Portland Timbers 1-3 Minnesota United FC: Deva Ju, Dammit

Best scenario, right?

I remember the happy tweets from the first 30 minutes of the Portland Timbers preseason game against Minnesota United FC. While there was some confusion about whether the balance of the Loons’ line-up came from their first or second team, general agreement held that the Timbers B-team was giving them the proverbial business. The business, I tell you.

The Timbers actually scored the first goal in that preseason game, only for Minnesota to start by finding ways to stop the Timbers attack and end with them punching Portland four goals into submission before it all ended in a 4-2- win for them, again, in Portland. The Timbers pulled one goal back courtesy of Ken Krolicki (and may we meet again, no, not seriously), but the loss was total, abject, and a bunch of other words authors like to use to really drive home a point. Tonight, Portland appeared to have repeated the feat of pulling back one useless goal, only to have it called back, correctly and painfully, as offside (and it's not even worthy of a solo highlight...damn). So, that’s not even a consolation goal and now the games count. Super.

Portland lost to Minnesota 1-3 tonight in Portland, at Providence Park, and this was unnervingly close to what I expected to happen. The sense of déjà vu didn’t just go back to the preseason loss; it went back to Portland’s aimless, meandering 2019.

The pattern is, by now, fairly well established: Portland can’t score goals, which means that pretty much any team with a sufficiently positive goal differential has a fair chance of beating them any given week. Minnesota, as it happens, has become one of those teams. In a fun twist, a lot of the key work came from MLS 3.0 (or thereabouts) players – e.g., Kevin Molino and Ethan Finlay (see all goals, but the third). These aren’t world-beaters, their talents rarely translate to the world stage (not least because they don’t get the chance so often and…fine, most of them would die on the biggest stage), but the part of me that frets over the United States’ capacity to produce effective attacking players always thrills a little at seeing loosely-known players from the home country take charge and win a game. Raising the bar for the next generation is a good thing…just wish they didn’t raise it at Portland’s expense.

That doesn’t mean there was anything elegant about Minnesota’s winning goals. If you’re familiar at all with the Omak Stampede (I have people from thereabouts), there wasn’t much more grace to either of los Loons’ goals; success followed from a combination of speed of thought and chaos that they’ll only pull off every third new moon (has anyone checked the lunar calendar!?!), but it was sufficient for tonight, and for the central, solitary reason noted above, i.e., Portland sucks at chance creation. To put that another way, I see from the box score that Portland had 14 shots, only I’m arguing that Sebastian Blanco’s wild, lobbed shot toward the MAC represents those chances as well as anything.

Yeah, yeah, they had better shots tonight. While the official Mothership approved highlights includes only Cristian Paredes’…decent shot, Portland worked a brilliant play up Minnesota’s left in the first half, then up the gut a little later, and then maybe once more in the second half, but that could just be the Paredes shot above, so who really knows? Portland really did start strong and, for the nth, foolish time, I thought maybe they’d figured out something, some new at least semi-reliable path to goal. Moreover, to credit the theory, Felipe Mora finally snuck out of my blind-spot tonight. He didn’t drive the attack or anything, but I also don’t think that’s Mora’s game. I’m more than a little surprised that I haven’t seen his name next to the word “poacher,” because that’s what Mora looks like to me. All the same, he rather brilliantly twisted Ike Opara into knots to earn the penalty kick that Diego Valeri slotted home, but…I guess the question you have to ask yourself is this: did Portland’s attack look dangerous enough to make you feel confident about the season ahead? You don’t want to know my answer, but it’s clearly implied in all the above.

Overall, this game sinks me deeper into the Slough of Despond - and that has everything to do with an inability to see a road, never mind the road to a higher, better state. For those watching in the stadium, the FS1 broadcast reported from the sidelines that Portland’s coach, Giovanni Savarese, hoped to see his players use the width a lot more, to whip in some crosses. Based on most of what I saw tonight, that was either a clever ruse on Savarese’s part, or all the attacking field players decided to ignore Gio’s direction. And that’s where things get tricky for me.

1) I bitch about how much and badly Portland crosses the ball constantly, something I’m by no means alone in doing. I’ll believe crossing the ball is their strength the day they understand how Mora (or Ebobisse or Niezgoda) actually works, but I haven’t seen it so far. I’m happy about the historically low number of crosses Portland played tonight, but I’m not against crosses per se, so much as I’m against dumb crosses. And Portland plays a lot of dumb crosses.

2) One of the only useful notes on my paper notepad reads, “If Portland can’t play centrally, they can’t play at all.” That’s what the Timbers did at their best tonight, break lines up Minnesota’s gut and force an exposed defense to manage ensuing lateral passes. The thing is, the more they tried to do that as the game went on, the more the whole like looked like a demonic combination of red rover and Minnesota beating Portland at their own game. And that’s fun, right? That’s fun!

Bottom line: life in the heart of a transition is inherently tricky. Even if you think Mora was fine to good tonight, tell me you don’t hope that Jaroslaw Niezgoda is better, a little more like Jeremy Ebobisse on the “soccer player” level, and a little better on the “forward” level. All in all, though, this is something close to the attacking set-up I’ve seen most often in 2020 and it’s something that’s never impressed me.

Going the other way, and to finally get a little positive, Portland has a ton of options at hand; the real question is what they can get out of any and/or all of them. Best-case scenario, there’s a kid-coming-home-from-Halloween aspect to all this – i.e., that moment of dumping your haul on the floor and getting all dizzy trying to decide where you want to start, only in this case it’s deciding who you want to start, where, and when you want to take them off, and, seriously, can we put an end to that 89th minute substitution bullshit? Either make a change or don’t; more than anything else, give the player you put in a chance to change the game or don’t bother. Also, I am so proud of that last, jumbled sentence…

So, yeah, obviously I’m disappointed in the result. I’m also willing to wait to get the new guys folded into the team, young and old…y’know, like rolling raisins into one of those Christmas loafs you keep refusing every Christmas morning. That doesn’t mean I see the old, fairly successful guard expiring and leaving the baton for the taking. More than that I see Savarese et. al. taking stock of the new talent and trying to find the best way it fits together with the older players – e.g., your Valeris, your Charas, maybe even your Sebastian Blancos.

To hold up Yimmi Chara as an example, Savarese had him trying to stretch the back line with balls over the top during the first 10 minutes, only to have him tuck in beside his brother at other points in the first half. Like everything else tonight, all that worked till it didn’t. Based on everything I saw, once Minnesota broke the code…

There were a lot of positives to take from the first 30 minutes. After that, not so much. Still, the rhythm was good, the Timbers showed they could play (though not score)…and all that held until Minnesota scored two goals in as many minutes late-ish in the second half. Going the other way, things were hardly going gangbusters for Portland to that point. You had to squint to see the spells of real pressure and the game states generally tilted in Minnesota’s favor once they took over the game.

Is that…yeah, that’s everything, the big picture stuff at least. I’ll close out with some stray notes.

- First and foremost, Minnesota looks like a decent bet for the 2020 post-season, so the only real shame in losing to them is that it happened at home. Moreover, there’s no point in excluding that from the calculation. Whether the MLS…did I call them 3.0 guys? Who cares. The point is, their half cast-offs performed better than all of Portland’s assembled players and that’s pretty much everything, especially on match day.

- Related, Chase Gasper is one hell of a fullback.

- Unrelated, Romain Metanaire’s savage hip-check on Jorge Villafana was the game’s low-light.

- Finlay is fast, like in the way Andy Polo is supposed to be fast.

- Yimmi is the same way. It was really nice to see a “fast” Timbers player actually look fast. More importantly, his feet look pretty damn silky. Again, I’m now on the theory that Gio has puzzle pieces that he has to fit together.

I think that last thought is my biggest one: Portland may or may not have good pieces to play; the only thing that’s clear at the moment is that they have yet to configure them in any way that’s rational or useful. If that can happen, the Timbers will have a decent 2020. If not…the globally awful year that was 2019 will continue into a semi-infinite future.

- Oh, one more thing: Dario Zuparic had a series of moments around the 50th minute that impressed me enough to start taking note. He had some big plays on either side of that as well, so here’s to hoping the Timbers have some real depth at centerback. Based on everything I’ve seen so far, they’ll need the options.

All for tonight, and/or this week. Till the next, ideally better, outing.