Portland Timbers 4-4 Real Salt Lake, And Other Things That Don't Make Sense...

Dream bigger, MLS.

Not to rehash an evil evening, but I was very much split-screening the Portland Timbers, frankly, bizarre 4-4 draw at “home” against Real Salt Lake. Suffice to say, it was a strange and messy night over the West Hills last night. The Portland Police keep letting in these weird right-wing goon mobs, knowing it riles up the locals…also, it feels really goddamn deliberate. And bound to lead to violence. These are the times. Anyway, I watched more of that when I wanted and missed out on the fugue state I try to achieve when watching sports. Getting there takes some doing….

Maybe Timbers players had the pick-up-n-flags parade in their heads as they warmed up. RSL players had a whale-sized distraction of their own, what with the “Dell Roy Hansen said what?” meltdown. I don’t know if any of that mattered, but both teams played this double-whiplash draw with a certain, who-knows-how-long-we’ll-play abandon. Things feel oddly contingent lately.

While I wouldn’t call the game fun, a lot of things happened. It was busy. It was open. It was a rare night when everyone seemed constantly surprised by everything, when eyeing the next opportunity was more important than marking, and so on. It felt soft, basically, like an all-star game. Or, again, maybe everybody’s a bit distracted lately.

Overall, I’m trying to find a way to explain how a team that played stout defense during its MLS Is Back “Cup run” has allowed an average of 3.5 goals against over its last two games. And don’t gimme that shit about sample size.

The Seattle loss followed a well-worn pattern (their stone wall defense and sufficient attack, which struck again) and didn’t disturb me as a result. But, seeing the Timbers cough up four goals in the very next game and, no offense, to Real Salt Lake? Mudville has been better. To the Timbers’ credit, they played to their strength and got production from just about everyone you’d want them to in the attack, whether old standards like Sebastian Blanco or (and please) some succession and/or bridge players in Jaroslaw Niezgoda and Felipe Mora. Portland counter-punched both smartly and timely to make the game 4-2 in the…Jesus Christ, 85th minute(?), and that gets to the question that’s on the mind of anyone who still cares about Timbers soccer right now: how the HELL did Portland give up two goals during second half stoppage?

FC Cincinnati 0-0 Columbus Crew SC: MVPs and DPs...and Deserts

What is on the dark side of the dune?

Without polling data to support it, I’d imagine that what most FC Cincinnati fans want to see out of their time right now is signs of improvement and/or life. As I’ll argue below, those are related by distinct concepts.

First, has FC Cincy improved? Yes, without question. The team ended its inaugural 2019 Major League Soccer campaign eating bowls full of shit on both sides of the ball and, so far in this 2020, they’ve cut down on the number of bowls they’re downing by…oh, ‘round about 1/3. Mos of the improvement has come on the defensive side of the ball, even if the raw numbers torture the answer a little. FC Cincy has allowed 12 goals (this link will go stale Wednesday) over eight games so far during this exceedingly janky season. To compare that against their peers, the league-wide average is 9.9 goals allowed; Eastern Conference has allowed 8.9, while Western Conference teams as a whole have let 11.1 goals slip by on average. On the one hand, yes, Cincinnati is over the average no matter where you look. On the other, they let in seven of those 12 goals during just two games - the manual colon extraction against this same Columbus Crew SC down in Orlando, and…sometime last week, and inexplicably, against Chicago Fire FC. Yeah, yeah, it doesn’t count anywhere except in the analysis, but that means Cincy allowed just 5 goals over their other six games, for an 0.83 goals against average. Very good, in other words, and Bill & Ted levels of excellence so close after 2019’s “our goal is your goal” policy (can anyone translate that into Spanish? Think it’ll read better).

Fortunately(?), yesterday’s 0-0 draw versus Columbus followed that larger pattern. Better yet, keeping the Crew off the board left Cincy a permanent opening for taking either the lead, the game or both - something they had three verygoodchances to do (plus at least one more, if you count Joe Gyau’s follow-up under “very”). Better even than that, the defensive scheme Jaap Stam deployed got deeper and deeper inside each Columbus player’s head as the game (literally) wore on. The Crew didn’t have a chance I can recall outside a (decent) flurry early in the second half (a highlight). Their attacks broke down earlier as well as forced passes gave way to wayward ones and ideas on how to get from Point A and into Cincy’s goal dried up.

Chicago Fire FC 3-0 FC Cincinnati: The Folly of Turtling

Shit, that looks stupid...

I always expected that FC Cincinnati would weather another blow-out, just not like this. Objectively(?), the team needs to sort out how to come out and play and, had they lost 0-3 to Chicago Fire FC - yes, the undisputed kings of Major League Soccer rebranding and league’s most popular management across two decades by league-wide fan polls, that Chicago - making some attempt to do that, you could write that off getting singed by the learning curve. But to lose like that because you’re down two goals and you’ve got no present style of play outside a compact low-block? I’d call that cause for concern.

First, I’d dismiss any chatter that calls this a home game for Chicago; till further notice, MLS 2020 is a season without home-field advantage. Second - and this is more for me than you - don’t throw away the good from the last…four games. More to the point, it’s like Cincinnati players didn’t have any moments: Yuya Kubo did well to create his own shot after some decent inter-play up the Cincy’s right with Joe Gyau, Kendall Waston remains a solid (if screamingly obvious) threat on set-pieces, and Frankie Amaya looks more willing to put a team on his back every game; for what it’s worth, I liked Siem de Jong playing deeper and more centrally…yes, I know what I just typed and, yes, that only compounds a very persistent problem, but resolving The Midfield Situation (explained herein) will necessarily involve figuring out who fits where best and why. While that’s something that, ideally, the FC Cincy brain-trust will sort out on the training ground, it’s also something that will inevitably bleed onto the playing field until that happy day when The Midfield Situation meets The Midfield Solution and they move to a beautiful and well-appointed ranch-style home behind a white picket fence, amen, and let it come soon…

…but there’s no looking past the reality that tonight’s loss did not have game states, it had a game state - i.e., around 80 non-sequential minutes of Chicago figuring out how to get through Cincinnati’s turtle-on-its-back low-block. The only time I felt even a flicker of hope that Cincinnati would make them game a fight, never mind turn it around, came at the start of the second half. I figured Jaap Stam had gamed out some alternatives as that dreadful first half wound down, some fresh stage direction and inspiration that would give his team a chance to claw back a goal, maybe even make Chicago sweat a little. Instead, Cincinnati played the game they should have - i.e., hunting the ball, if just to force one issue - only during stoppage time of the first half and, fitfully, in the first five minutes of the second. They collapsed back into their defensive shape and treated the midfield stripe as some time-honored Rubicon they could only cross when a Cincinnati player had possession on either side of that, and got the result they deserved out of it.

Basically, I was able to cling to the hope that Cincinnati defaulted to a crouch over the last 15 minutes of the first half because they lacked instruction. The second half suggested a troubling counter-argument - e.g., it happened because they straight-up don't have a Plan B they trust on the defensive side. The deeper, deeply-inter-related issue is the reason why Cincinnati can’t go down a goal: they suck at goal scoring and chance creation generally, so…

Portland Timbers 0-3 Seattle Sounders: Indigestion & Sporting Metaphors

Straight up Umbrella Academy, man...

There isn’t really much to say about the Portland Timbers' 0-3 loss to dread rivals, the Seattle Sounders. If I had to liken it to anything, I’d go with high-stakes arm-wrestling (e.g., the good kind, where arms come off) or most tug-o-wars: basically, a contest that stays in balance for some length of time - about 70 minutes in this case - only to have things unravel very, very badly for one side or the other…

…this time, sadly, the Timbers were the team that unraveled. It’s in the way that you use it, or something like that. It comes and it goes…

All in all, this was your usual classic, tight rivalry affair, a game in which neither team took any real advantage until one team (again, Seattle) took all the advantages. The only real question - and it’s one larded in 500 pounds of bacon fat - is whether or not this worries Timbers fans in the near or short term…of which, near as I can tell, most Portland fans don’t even believe in a long-term - i.e., they believe COVID will fell the season before any meaningful resolution arrives - e.g., an MLS Cup, if one weighted to the bottom of the sea.

The long-term side of the equation deals in the simplest question of all: how big an obstacle does this Seattle team make on the way to…whatever happens at the end of an actually successful MLS 2020, assuming one even happens? And that’s where the rubber really hits the road: even post-Chad Marshall, post-Kim Yee-Hee, and without the (ever dubious) Javier Arreaga, the Sounders arrived in Providence Park as their usual, damnable, stubborn selves. They generally try to pace the game, trusting a succession of reliable defenses to give them time to experiment, while they let the attacking talent sort it out. Which they did - or rather, he did, with he being RaulRuidiaz (and then he got the secondary assist on the Seattle’s…reinsurance(?) goal), and, honestly, I could stop writing right here and you’d know nearly everything relevant about this game. Again, this was two good teams standing off until one of them broke through, at which point it became the team that broke through punishing the trailing team for trying. Oldest story in soccer, people…

FC Cincinnati 0-0 DC United: Progress and Measuring Height Against a Moving Wall

Now picture it non-linear.

Because I know FC Cincinnati fans have picked apart this game since Friday night, let’s call this a preview for tomorrow night…if without any real nnotes on Chicago Fire FC, who I haven’t watched at all since they shat out that shocker against the Seattle Sounders back during MLS Got Back. And it will be brief. Promise.

All in all, the game lacked in goals, intensity…shots on goal…just lacked really, and ended appropriately goal-less. Worse, this current DC United team is already a bugger to handicap against - and then Cincy played to type on both sides of the equation. Cincinnati didn’t score, but Frederic Brillant, Steve Birnbaum and Bill Hamid put up one hell of a wall for DC week in and out, so that doesn’t give you much. Cincinnati looked easy-breezy in defense and didn’t give DC more than a couple scraps (often with a well-arranged wall between the shooter and the goal to boot), but DC hasn’t generated either reliable or voluminous offense for a couple seasons, and now you have less with which to work. What we had here was a game that played out to expectations and moved no needles.

I think that’ll be a familiar sensation for both these teams for as long as this wonky bastard of a 2020 season limps along to…shit, where will it go? Simple sons-o’-bitches that they are, at least zombies know where they’re going - e.g., toward brains - but the Major League Soccer’s 2020 doesn’t have even that kind of direction. If anything, and for what it’s worth, I’d rather be a Cincinnati fan right now than a DC fan. While both teams labor under a work-in-progress incoherence, Cincinnati continues to integrate and arrange new, upgraded players - they even have someone shiny, new, and, ideally, specifically useful coming into the team - while, from a barely-interested distance, it looks like DC’s still waiting for Edson Flores to come good…or even start regularly.

On that, I worried a little that Flores or Federico Higuian would come in and take over the game, but, odd quality passes here or there (see below), I didn’t see any takers for that whole business of taking over the game.

That’s all I have for general commentary - it’ll specifics from here on out - but, to answer the big question, was this a good result for either team? Was it awful, though, from Cincy’s end (I can’t answer for DC)? Can the answer be no, while also acknowledging vital improvement. So long as one accepts the premise that Cincinnati’s defense left a gasping offense for dead in 2019, any and all clean sheets necessarily count as an upgrade…even if there is a finite, if-as-yet-undefined period after which goal-less draws stop counting as necessary progress and slouch to just plain old stagnation. And that’s the point of the departure for the detail work. In no particular order…

Portland Timbers 2-1 Orlando City SC: Your Asterisks Can Fuck Off

A holy grail.

First, how was that so satisfying? In form, the Magical World of Major League Soccer, aka, #MWoMLS, aka, #MLSIsBack, felt closest to the distilled version of the U.S. Open Cup that I’ve been psychically willing into existence since 2010 (if only low-key). On the other hand, like any playoff arrangement that (so long as you make it) washes away the sins of what came before (if only to an extent), this tournament felt like any other set of playoffs, only with a three-game “regular season” before it, which left precious little time for the finding of feet and the sorting out of issues for most teams involved.

Put in that last, specific contest, it’s less of a surprise that an experienced - or, in a more clarifying phrasing, a grounded - Portland Timbers team kept their collective heads in a refreshingly back-and-forth final 2-1 over a highly-deserving Orlando City SC that I expect we’ll all hear from in the near-future…long-term looks trickier, but their path looks surer than it did before this tournament.

There’s no question in my mind that having the more familiar set of assumptions won the game for Portland. And that’s where the urge to credit Orlando really kicks in: Diego Chara and Eryk Williamson never dominated the midfield like they had over some past games in this tournament. Both the Timbers’ game-plan and the way Orlando plays made putting pressure on the ball a game of laying traps, especially where the space gets tighter, and exploiting them. Some teams - LAFC springs to mind here - seek to overwhelm the opposition by throwing more players and passes at them than they can manage. Orlando, meanwhile, ran in a couple gears tonight: it was mostly methodical prying for openings - see the fucking crazy disparity in passes/possession - but they showed a pretty decent capacity to bull-rush players into Portland’s penalty area down the stretch (e.g., the only example from the highlights, but there were more); the general level of control was impressive, basically, and Orlando looked as likely as Philadelphia did to tie the game late. The way I see it, Portland fans have seen their team cough up enough leads to truly appreciate the occasions when they don’t do it. That detail alone made the Magical World of Major League Soccer a little more magical for Timbers fans than for anyone else in MLS…and people are already slagging this trophy, aren’t they? Yes…I can feel the energy seeping into my consciousness as I type. Bastards…

I have a couple more notes on Orlando before moving on. First, if you’ve looked into their history at all, you’ll know that defense has killed them for as long as they’ve been a(n MLS) franchise. As such, seeing them look as solid as they do during the run of play - not just tonight, but throughout the tournament (insofar as I watched them) - could be the brightest sign for their future. They look like they have something in Robin Jansson and Antonio Carlos, and credit to them for that…but, as a midfield obsessive, between received reputation and having seen Mauricio Pereyra over a full 90, I think Orlando has landed one hell of a player. He looks to have Diego Chara’s stamina and ball-hunting instincts, plus what looks like a slightly-elevated attacking skill-set. The headlines might go to Nani - and deservedly based on what he’s done in this tournament - but Pereyra feels more like the franchise player, especially given that he’s only 30.

Philadelphia Union 1-2 Portland Timbers: Opposite Day Was Fun, Mom!

Yeah, she's got a jet ski, but...

I’ve never been delighted to see so many of the (soft) expectations I had going into a game get up-ended (see twitter, JeffBull5). To start with an easy one, Jorge Villafana has made me nervous for as long as the Portland Timbers have dwelled in the blessed halls of The Magical Kingdom (now with working bathtub faucets and palatable lunches? presumably?), so an afternoon of watching highlights of the Philadelphia Union’s Brenden Aaronson tear up the right side of the field (that’s Portland’s left) made me wonder how much Jorge would have in the tank once Jim Curtin moved Aaronson inside and brought in Ilsinho to run at him. Villafana answered back with plenty, and then some! While I can’t say he locked down Portland’s left flank, he stretched the defensive equivalent of landmines and barbed wire across it and made Union attackers rue coming in there throughout the game.

My larger (largest?) anxiety was that Philly would spend the day absorbing pressure and timing their breakouts, something they’d proved adept at doing in every game through it’s long, and now-ended, journey through the Magical World of Major League Soccer (#MWoMLS). The Timbers rendered that broad strategy something short of requirements when Jeremy Ebobisse nodded home an early go-ahead goal (13th minute). Having watched that again (multiple times), I’m struck by where the Union went wrong: sure, Jack Elliott vacates the space around Ebobisse, but the way he chased Larrys Mabiala suggested, to me at least, that was part of the plan, even if that meant leaving Kai Wagner one-on-one against Ebobisse and Portland’s go-ahead goal says everything about how that went.

Before burying the lead too deep, the final score ended with the Timbers beating Philly 2-1, if by a quarter-man’s-body worth of width (feeling piratic themes; bear with me), the approximate measure by which Kacper Przybylko was legitimately offside when Aaronson squiggled through a clutch of Timbers defenders to set up what looked like the equalizer. Alas (for Philly fans), people interpret the rules by the rules (folly!) and, according to an exact reading of the rules, yes, Przybylko was, in fact, a quarter-man’s body offside, and thus endeth all talk of equalizers. Trust me, I hate it as much as you...

To draw back for a broader view, this game was built from a composite of game-states, and in a way not a lot of what I’ve watched from the MLS Is Back tournament have managed. I’m not saying one team or another hasn’t dominated the proceedings in this game or that (and gods know, I didn’t watch even 1/4 of all the games), so much as I’m saying this game felt tighter and less nakedly opportunistic than most of what I’ve watched so far. The trends/rhythms felt deeper, if nothing else. Then again, that could have been the agonizing process of the Union reorganizing around the concept of not scoring the first goal in a game…which they really had done in every game during this tournament until, oh, just a few hours ago. Back to those game-states…

New York City FC 1-3 Portland Timbers: Good as Advertized

C'mon on in to The Church of Happy, MFs!

Turns out it takes just one goal to improve one’s opinion on a team’s chances.

I expected a close game tonight. I even expected one team or the other to go up a goal during regulation. To clarify the thought, given the quality in both teams’ attacking personnel and/or general capabilities, no universe exists in which either the Portland Timbers or New York City FC does not score during regulation. Tonight, it was NYCFC, and through a penalty kick they earned more in spirit than the moment - i.e., New York was applying most the pressure, but most refs wouldn’t call what Larrys Mabiala did to Jesus Medina (right?) a foul in the middle of the field, never mind the area. Doesn’t matter, Medina buries the penalty kick and NYCFC goes up 1-0 at the 27th minute. So that’s that, they scored the inevitable, in-regulation goal…the real question was how the team that gave up that first goal would respond.

The Timbers answered inside the first half, building a goal from the back and out of trouble, more or less totally in control from their defensive third into NYCFC’s. The one time they lost control saw Jorge Villafana’s cross ping off some body part or another from a New York defender and into the path of Sebastian Blanco, who only had to feint and fire just so to put the Timbers back on level terms; the move as a whole, however, put NYC on notice. Full credit to New York, because they had Portland chasing from…something like the 10th minute to something like the 30th. Still, the Timbers showed they could break NYCFC’s lines nearly every time they could get their heads up; New York just made that hard for a while. This was a fun game to watch, full stop, a chess-match built of positives, where both teams left space for the game to move in either direction. There are few pleasures greater in soccer, perhaps even in sports generally, than watching two teams that believe they’re the better one. Both teams underlined that claim with scattered incidents of minor violence. No soccer players were injured in the filming of this documentary, etc.

I expected something from NYCFC tonight, something I’d expected from earlier games in the MLS Is Back tournament, but, point of interest, did not see: they tend to out-pass teams, pace the game, and generally manage possession. Here’s the thing: after failing to do that against Orlando City SC and Inter Miami CF (wait a tic…both Florida teams), NYC reverted to their familiar “high-usage” formula, where they boot around the ball probing for openings…at least that’s what 200 more passes and lots of aimless television told me. All that time got wasted because the Timbers also reverted to type: give them the ball and space to play in, they will string you like a dazed fish. And that brings us to Portland’s second goal…