Vancouver Whitecaps 0-1 Portland Timbers: Road Games & Resources

The perverse reality of the road at home.

You shouldn’t look like the road team at home, not even during a pandemic, but the Portland Timbers did that through the long…interminable, really, middle passage of their…let’s call it loosely-justified 1-0 win over the Vancouver Whitecaps, at home, in Portland, Oregon tonight. Holy shit, that’s a lotta commas. Now, more ellipses…

First, externalities are key to understanding this game. The Timbers just played five games in 14 days, and with the first three of those games on the road. That, obviously, points to the second externality - e.g., the fact that Portland had no choice but to rotate a lot of the squad tonight. It wasn’t second-team top-to-bottom, of course, by which I mean you can make arguments about who would start at fullback for your best possible Starting XI for the Portland Timbers in 2020 (fwiw, tonight was 50/50 for me), but Steve Clark in goal, with Dario Zuparic and Larrys Mabiala in front of him, and Diego Chara in front of them is Portland’s starting set, if only until Chara’s scarcely comprehensible retirement. In a key sense, then - in the key sense, for my money - the Timbers made the correct gamble tonight.

While that opinion wasn’t quite “proved” by the final 15 minutes of the game - i.e., when Jeremy Ebobisse and Jaroslaw Niezgoda came in for Christian Paredes and Felipe Mora, respectively - it posited a powerful argument against the team that started for the Timbers tonight. Explaining why that is requires going back to the beginning.

Felipe Mora nodded home the game’s one and only goal not just early in the game, but during the first stage of Portland’s early period of dominance. The Timbers had the Whitecaps over a barrel for the first…I’d say 25 minutes of the game. That period culminated in Eryk Williamson hitting a Mora chest-bump-pass first-time toward…what’s his name’s goal (fine; Bryan Meredith), but that was a solid stretch for Portland. They looked comfortable, confident, not just in defending, but in moving the ball forward.

Portland Timbers 1-0 Seattle Sounders: On Surviving a Pithing

Portland, right now. Still standing.

I want to start this post on a human note - a sincere one too, because I don’t know what my “voice” sounds like in other people’s heads. As I watched the Portland Timbers…I’ll get into it later, but let’s call it very fortunate 1-0 win over the Seattle Sounders, I noted a lot of players who played half-absent, i.e., they couldn’t and/or weren’t focused for this reason or that. If/when I dump on any given player down below, let me make one thing clear: Portland is a heavy goddamn place to be right now, what with the fires, the right-wing goon parades, protests, plus an ongoing, never-ending pandemic, and, as such, I hereby pardon anyone for a lack of focus, from now and until things are either better, or we’ve figured out how to endure Idiocracy with some form of grace.

The good news: the Timbers gutted the Sounders! And I have the good fortune of writing that literally, because by what other name do you call such a perfect incision?

The bad news: sweet Jesus' saliva, what the hell was going on with the team tonight? The Timbers were masters of nothing and nowhere, stumbling bumpkins on their home patch.

The Timbers haven’t played this flat, dazed and passive for the length of 2020. I could be talked into calling this worse than any of the regular nightmares from the 2019 season, if only in the sense that more people did several things wrong: sure, the 2019 Timbers tortured us all by flailing to score for hundreds of minutes on end, but the Timbers survived global failures just now and all around the field: the defensive posture respected Seattle more than they’ll ever deserve, which undoubtedly followed from the dead-frog-wired-to-an-electrode energy that Portland just couldn’t seem to snap out of, plus they couldn’t pass fucking wind out of the defensive third, and since the fuck when does a Timbers team not use passes to the low-side of the middle third - aka, Diego Chara land - to play out of the back?

New York Red Bulls 0-1 FC Cincinnati: Shall We Dance Again?

RBNY tomorrow, RBNY forever!

For what it’s worth, refreshing my memory by watching the MLS-in-15 cast a brighter light on FC Cincinnati’s grinding 1-0 road win over the New York Red Bulls. If nothing else, it made the whole thing come off as less of a grind - at least on Cincy’s end of things. Oh, and the goal that won it was an absolute delight: Haris Medunjanin floated an olimpico over Red Bulls’ ‘keeper David Jensen’s head, who was dead to rights even before he bumbled backward a defender who’s name doesn’t really matter. Better still, seeing all those Cincy players come up to Medunjanin during the after-game handshakes with dazed and happy looks on their faces might count as my personal highlight of their 2020 season so far. If there were other, better ones, blame it on recency bias.

My strongest overall reaction to the game is pretty simple: wow, do the Red Bulls suck. I accept that’s a strange thing to say, what with them two whole points over FC Cincy in the Eastern Conference standings, but my eyes aren’t lying to me either. New York managed just two shots on goal last Saturday, one of them a pathetic slow-roller that Cincy ‘keeper saw coming from a mile away and had to wait on its arrival. They flailed a couple shots from range - Brian White probably had the best one of those at just half a dozen feet over the crossbar - but, overall, the Red Bulls strained for openings and didn’t look like they’d ever score.

That adds up a little better when you check the standings (already one game stale) and see that New York has scored just one more goal than Cincinnati during the 2020 season - and, so long as you accept that Cincy’s attack sucks (it does, but…) certain obvious things follow from. Every time I’ve watched the Red Bulls over the past couple seasons, I see a team that doesn’t do anything particularly well. And that’s a hell of a fall off for a team that won the Supporters’ Shield three times during the 2010s. While I’m still able to place most of the players in their starting XI, New York’s overall vibe is an anonymous collection of guys role-playing their assigned positions. Again, Cincinnati hasn’t been good, but New York hasn’t been much better: just 1-4-1 over their last six games.

Just one more thing about the Red Bulls: FC Cincy seems to have their number. They hold the edge in the series between the teams for 2020, two wins to New York’s one and, now, a 5-3 advantage in goals scored. A related fun(?) fact: Cincinnati has scored just three goals against teams that aren’t the Red Bulls this fucked-up season for a frankly wretched 0.33 goals for average against all other comers (well, four goals if you add the one they bagged against the Portland Timbers in the MLS Is Back tournament). I mean…what do you do with this information except ask for more games against New York?

San Jose Earthquakes 1-6 Portland Timbers: Margaritas and Grains of Salt

They work best together, yes?

A lot of teams come out with “high energy” - i.e., a plan to overwhelm the opposition with bodies and velocity - and one can weigh the question of how well it worked on any given night in minutes and momentum. The Portland Timbers announced their intentions tonight by letting every San Jose Earthquake player within checking distance know they showed up tonight; every ball was challenged, especially in the first 5 minutes or so.

It’s where things go after that shapes a game. A(n, as it turns out, 20 minute-)wilderness stretched between that 5th-minute domination and Portland’s first goal, which was scored via penalty by Living, Playing MLS-Legend Diego Valeri. The crucial detail comes with how that penalty kick came to be and why it presented as almost absurdly replicable template for the ultimately six-goal rout that the Timbers dropped on San Jose tonight. Yes, all right, I may be over-drawing the lines of the argument, but I also know and aver that my very own eyes saw a parade of Portland players break San Jose’s defense entirely with either a run or a pass to a run straight into the dazed heart of San Jose’s defense, something that any given professional athlete - for sake of argument, a professional soccer player, aka, someone who, in practical terms, convinced someone to pay them money to play a game (seriously, think about that for a minute) - should never be able to do by simply jogging straight up the middle of the field with the ball at his feet. San Jose has issues.

A thought follows from that: if cracking San Jose is complicated as guessing a “12345” password, what does your team’s rampant success really mean? If a bully asks a kid for his lunch money and he just hands it over, is the kid still a bully, or just a very persuasive speaker? [Ed. - I don't know quite know what I meant by that either.]

Overall, call me optimistic, while also binging on grains of salt. Onto the details…

The one thing I have to fault about the Timbers 6-1 study in several of San Jose’s collective short-comings tonight was the aggressively-passive choices Portland’s heavily-rotated defense made in allowing the ‘Quakes’ one goal on the night. Don’t get too bothered because that’s one goal surrendered…plus a barrage of chances nobly swatted away by, I’m saying it now, Slovenian royalty (Aljaz Ivacic crushed it tonight), but there was a moment when a Timbers defense almost let a team they’d drop two goals on, away and in the first half (here's the other one), back into the game. Momentum matters in soccer and that’s been a real buzzsaw for the Timbers lately. As such, it was fairly encouraging to see a make-shift defense - e.g., Marco Farfan, out of position at right back, plus real or alleged back-ups, Bill Tuiloma and Julio Cascante - hold up against any team in MLS, because that hasn't been a regular thing lately. And I mean that even as San Jose arguably started more of a B-Team than the Timbers.

San Jose Earthquakes 1-1 Portland Timbers: Burner Game...But Can They Afford It?

Yeah, yeah, all good. You forget me, I forget you.

Honestly, my head is swimming after the Portland Timbers’ 1-1 draw away to the San Jose Earthquakes. Sweet Ginger Brown, where to begin?

Broadly speaking and specific circumstances notwithstanding, I will never understand why anyone expects happy revelations of any line-up that doesn’t involve some number of starers. The argument against is in the bare concept of “starter” - i.e., they’re first-choice for a reason. As such, a wholesale change to your local team’s starting Xi should be treated, and I mean this generally, as a “burner game” in the same sense drug dealers use burner phones - e.g., it’s not Plan A and/or what you use to call your family, or even your mistress.

After that top-line thought, things get really complicated…

I want to start with San Jose because, based on what I’ve seen, the current standings and/or their league-leading goals against record - 2.45 goals against, y’all - this is not a good team. I hadn’t seen the goal Jordan Morris scored against them (early) in the Seattle Sounders’ 7-1 demolition of them two, three games ago (for San Jose), but that’s a why are you even in this league moment. Getting beat by the soccer equivalent of the end-around is down-right shameful. Regardless of the specific alignment they chose for tonight (but it looks starter heavy), that’s the team Portland’s reserves played tonight and, frankly, it wasn’t encouraging. Going the other way, that means San Jose either couldn’t bury Portland’s B-team at home - where they haven’t won since August 31 of 2019 (and they lost six straight through the rest of the season) - and while rarely looking anything like goal-dangerous, despite having number heavily in their favor. To the credit of exactly one man (Valeri Qazaishvili, aka, Vako), they scored the one goal they needed tonight earn the draw...if just to avoid shame. And even that barely went in. Look at the box score and weep, San Jose fans.

They had quality shots, though, that, but for the grace of God and Steve Clark’s left or right shoulder (c’mon, do you care?) could have turned the game into a runaway - and at various points throughout. Suffice to say, starting Diego Chara in a sea of newbs had its consequences and the Timbers were fortunate to survive all that, and for as long as it went on (which is to say, Cade Cowell hit the wood work at the 82nd minute and Clark had to bail out Portland again and damn-near the death). In case I haven’t hammered this home enough, there’s a transition coming down the pike for the Timbers and things are looking…again, complicated.

Los Angeles FC 4-2 Portland Timbers: Half-Empty Glasses and the State of the Auditions

Are we sad glass?!

“Nobody thought we’d have five goals in this half, but we do!”
- Max Bretos, at the end of the first half

Why wouldn’t people expect five goals? The Portland Timbers came into the game having given up 11 goals over their past four games; add the four goals they, by and large, handed Los Angeles FC in last night’s 4-2 loss, and the Timbers now average three goals against per game. Fun fact, LAFC let in three goals in three of their past five games (they did better against the San Jose Earthquakes, and now the Timbers). Fans should have expected goals, in other words, because both these teams have taken to bleeding them.

Concerns about the Timbers’ defense, which has officially reached “holy shit” levels of concern, have merged into worries about the team's future. That doesn’t make it unreasonable, however, to ask what the average Timbers fans expected out of a game with two vertebrae removed from Portland’s defensive scheme (e.g., Larrys Mabiala and Diego Chara) and one arm tied behind its back in the attack (aka, the wounded Sebastian Blanco). I can’t account for what caused it - extreme recency bias (aka, the win over Seattle)? a perfect balance and quantity of chemical encouragement? a wildly burning lust for any positive sensation? - but I somehow went into the game thinking that things would work out. And, for as long as Portland contained everything LAFC tried to do, and after they pulled them apart and ran riot through the openings for a beautiful and impressive team goal, the delusion held up very nicely, thanks!

Reality started knocking rather loudly, however, and shortly after the hydration break. I saw some chatter during the game about that stalling the Timbers’ momentum, but it seems just as likely that LAFC made some adjustments I didn’t notice (see, “balance and quantity of chemical encouragement”). Their first goal didn’t bother me overly - a set-piece, a lost mark, etc. - but, when LAFC returned the “pull ‘em apart and run riot” favor for the go-ahead goal, and then Portland's defenders shared a collective, simultaneous snooze on another set-piece that, frankly, sucked, the alarms that had been blaring before the win over Seattle blared anew. Fortunately, just when you started to wonder how bad things could get, Jeremy Ebobisse lobbed Jorge Villafana’s pin-point cross over LAFC ‘keeper Pablo Sisniega on the last play of the first half.

New York City FC 2-1 FC Cincinnati: 20 Happy MInutes and the Nature of Inevitability

Yes,  you can play that way, but...

Not many people would take a second glance at FC Cincinnati’s 1-2 loss to New York City FC. They’d file it away as expected and move on; if anything piqued his/her/their interest it would be the fact that Cincy scored a goal. (Not that record, motherfuckers! Not today!). The bird’s-eye-view isn’t wrong, but it’s not entirely right either. This thing’s hairy with nuance…have I mentioned how much I miss the routine of soaking up context by watching too many goddamn MLS in 15 highlights? Have I mentioned how much the pandemic murdered the logic of going through that particular motion?

To stare directly at the warts, yes, FC Cincinnati played a sloppy, madding opening…65 minutes, and “opening” and “65 minutes” should never go together. To frame the point around two emblematic moments, the first came when Alexander Ring made what felt like NYCFC’s 100th scything run straight up Cincinnati’s gut; Ring slipped to the outside when Kendall Waston lunged in, but, and this is very much to Waston’s credit (especially at 32) he got enough of his body in the way and eventually muscled Ring off the ball, which almost certainly would have ended in a goal. He managed to clear it…maybe to the top of the defensive third? The ball might have crossed over into NYCFC’s half in a particularly #blessed moment, but it didn’t stray much further upfield for most of the first half and too much of the second.

The real question became apparent only after Allan Cruz and (sure, why not?) Nick Hagglund came on at the 65th minute: why the hell did FC Cincinnati spend 65 minutes hanging from the edge of a goddamn cliff when, according to what happened after the 65th minute, it’s possible - and merely possible - they didn’t have to?

The second moment relates to the first, in that it expresses the flip-side of the same dynamic. On one of the rare occasions that the ball crossed the center stripe and into NYCFC’s half, Yuya Kubo bolted up the left side of the field with the ball at his feet; the literally only other Cincinnati player who joined him on the happy side of the center stripe was Jurgen Locadia, and he was all the way on the other side of the damn field. For the sake of argument, set aside whatever specific acts you think either of those players should or should not do in any given moment and focus on the deeper question how the hell two dudes split on opposite sides of entire goddamn half of a soccer field are supposed to beat four-to-six players defending that same space?

Columbus Crew SC 3-0 FC Cincinnati: A Light State of Disbelief

“It seems like once they give up a goal…”

I didn’t catch the name of Columbus Crew SC’s color commentator, but 1) she’s pretty good at her job, and 2) she summed up the state of play for FC Cincinnati’s 2020 in those few words. A season defined in less than a sentence.

Cincy is a limited team, without question. The only real question is whether they can be better with the current roster. I’d like to think so, but that’s without having any stirring ideas for rearranging the players in a way that makes them a more dangerous team and in a way that doesn’t leave the back-line for dead. With all that noted, I don’t like how Jaap Stam lined them up against Columbus yesterday - which, despite how MLS’s site mapped that for the prior game against Columbus, looked like the same thing to me. It looks…cluttered, I guess, in terms of going forward. I’ll elaborate on that in a bit. First, some notes on the game/0-3 loss for FC Cincy.

Did Cincinnati ever really look like scoring to you? Was there a moment you thought, “they’re getting closer,” or did the whole thing look like an exercise in holding on for dear life from the starting whistle till the final one? I mean, set aside the fact they didn’t put even one shot on goal (also, really?), obviously.

The way I saw it, it was possible to see the outlines of a goal-less draw, maybe even dream about a 1-0 Cincinnati win until somewhere around the 30th minute. From that point forward, and as happens when a better team plays a weaker on, Columbus started finding seams to spaces ever closer to Cincinnati’s goal. Having Darlington Nagbe around, doing his free-radical thing of unbalancing the defensive and collecting one foul after another in Zone 14, probably did as much as anything to force the slow unraveling, but Pedro Santos, Youness Mokhtar and, later, Luis Diaz joined in the “fun” of tormenting Cincy’s defense. The wheels came all the way off when Gyasi Zardes came on in the 62nd minute and couldn’t stop beating Cincinnati defenders to the ball. Had aliens watched that game, they would have applauded the amount and variety of probing.

Seattle Sounders 1-2 Portland Timbers: Mysteries of the Moon

It's coming for you...

To get one major talking point out of the way, of course, you can’t excuse the…fuck me, what? 11 goals given up by the Portland Timbers over the past four games - and that includes tonight’s 2-1 win over the Seattle Sounders in Seattle.Going the other way, if there was ever a better occasion for pitching a stoutly shaky, yet ultimately winning performance, it doesn’t get better than stealing three points out of CenturyLink Field…

The game states went wild tonight, like they got boosted by the lunar cycle or something. When Seattle got the upper hand, they spun Portland’s defense dizzy, too often leaving it to the last man or two to keep the next three goals going in. That was the end of the first half, but the same thing played out through a strenuous 20-minute period in the second half, say, minutes 50-70, only with Portland having the upper hand. I won't dwell on it overly, but you don’t see teams swap periods of dominance like that often and it was…just really fun.

In an odd twist, the first two goals in this game came before all that happened - or at least that’s what happened where I lived, having missed the first 15 minutes and/or Eryk Williamson’s first-ever MLS goal…to think I would have embroidered that had I seen it live. ‘Twas a beauty, though, the way he fielded Seattle’s clearance and turned it into a slicing run, followed by a (fucking srsly?) wall-pass that everyone should have seen coming, but Diego Valeri’s touch…goddamn, I mean, that only looks easy till you watch 50 other dudes fuck up that same touch in 147 different ways. Everything came together in the end, and it was 1-0 Portland, despite Blanco limping off eight minutes earlier.

Because I missed it, I cannot say whether Portland’s goal followed from a spell of pressure; I can only say, and with certainty, that Seattle’s lone goal (also, not bad) came at the front end of their best spell and I’d hold that up as why surviving that became the one and only reason the Portland Timbers survived the night. Seattle players beat every Timbers player to every ball, loose or otherwise, for at least 15 minutes, but Portland, by the grace of Steve Clark, held on.

That said, any comments Seattle fans might have about cosmic injustice can take a long walk into I Don’t Give a Shit Lake, because the Timbers put Stefan Frei and the Sounders through the same blender during the earlier portions of the second half. That held until, piece-by-piece, what was Portland’s one-way traffic toward Seattle’s goal became receding lines of resistance toward Portland’s, which pointed toward an ugly reprise of the end of the first half, but that was only until the simplest of goals by Felipe Mora, which didn’t so much come against the run of play as violate it. And, with that, the Timbers won the game, the Sounders lost it, and who can’t be happy with that?

Nobody, I hope, but gods know I won’t try.

FC Cincinnati 0-0 Chicago Fire FC: 25% Game, 75% State of the Union

I'm guessing it wasn't as obnoxious, but who knows?

With FC Cincinnati posting another scoreless draw, I decided to do a little spelunking into what something like that looks like on the numbers side. Over the past five games - and this counts Wednesday night’s double-donuts result hosting Chicago - Cincy posted a total of 43 shots, with just 13 on frame. They hit their highwater mark against the Portland Timbers down in Orlando - twelve shots, five on goal - and their lowest against Columbus Crew SC, when they fired five shots, two of them on goal. Watching all those minutes has been...meds?

My much-abused memory tells me they attacked better than usual against Chicago last Wednesday night, forcing three big saves out of the Fire’s Robert “Mrs.” Shuttleworth, with Jurgen Locadia’s standing out as the nearest miss of the bunch. (There’s no select highlight for the shot Siem de Jong wailed over the crossbar, but I count that as Cincinnati’s most tactically-replicable chance created in the run of play.) According to the box score, they managed eight shots in all against Chicago, with three on frame, numbers that put them just under their five-game average for shots (8.6) and just over their five-game average for shots on goal (2.6).

While it’s no state secret that Cincinnati doesn’t create much for offense, those numbers are some combination of manifest and ever-so-slightly-fucking depressing. Off-season renovations to the roster made some kind of learning curve inevitable, but those numbers leave an obvious question hanging in the air: how does this get better?

To continue on a high note, I was delighted to see Cincy come and get after the visitors from Chicago - that goes double given the maddeningly passive approach they took when they visited Chicago (since I checked, they posted eight shots, just one on goal in that one). And, maybe had Maikel van de Werff nodded home Haris Medunjanin’s beautiful set piece (see above for link, first one; also, what the hell were the Fire defenders thinking on that one?), that would have forced Chicago to open up a little bit more…on the evidence above, however, I don’t have much faith that they would…

…also of note, Cincinnati has scored just one goal over the past five games and that was back in Orlando…which I miss in this weird way I can’t quite explain…maybe the “bubble energy” better matched the ambient, brittle weirdness of 2020, but who knows?

Portland Timbers 2-3 Los Angeles Galaxy: Tumbling Dice on the Starting Xi

Starting Xi. The question is, what's next?

With tonight’s 2-3 win on the road over the Portland Timbers (well…*), the Los Angeles Galaxy have, with allowance for the postponed game versus the Seattle Sounders, quietly built a three-game winning streak in the next leg of Major League Soccer regular season play. Speaking of, does anyone know where the 2020 irregular season even goes after September 16? If not, I finally looked it up:

“Up to 18 matches (a maximum of nine home and nine away) during the continuation of play in home markets following the MLS is Back Tournament.”

OK, so that’s a maximum of 12 more games (right?) for each team after the six-game stretch that followed MLS Got Back - i.e.., the period that ends on September 16 - but without that 12-game future actually being mapped at time of writing. Also, note the language: “up to 18 matches” and “(a maximum of nine home and nine away),” etc.

The condensed schedule - e.g., two games per week since the end of MLS Got Back - predicated some level of squad rotation and, to anyone wondering, yes, I remain a fan of squad rotation as a concept. That said, with specific regard to tonight’s game - and this is with games away to Seattle, Los Angeles FC and the San Jose Earthquakes away in Portland’s future over the next two weeks - was a home game against a still-forming Galaxy team that right time to rest nearly every (or was it every?) starter on the roster? Wait…yes, it was every player on the roster, total turnover and dice a-tumbling. So, was that the right call by Giovanni Savarese, given the teams ahead and where the Timbers will play them?

I’ll let people lay their own bets on that one, but I will say this: all of Portland's regular starters showed every sign of needing a break over Portland’s last twolosses (I’m re-writing nothing; the draw v. RSL was a loss)…and what if rest with a side of putting the fear into any starter he could motivated Savarese’s decision to put the starting Xi on full spin-cycle?

As someone conditioned against accepting any official line absent evidence - i.e., I don’t care what anyone says on the practice ground, or in a post- or pre-game presser; I only care what happens on game day - I’m stuck weighing the opportunity cost of those first…carry the one…66 minutes of starting…let’s call them Portland’s future against the Galaxy tonight.