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 looks like a bad team (again), even for Weird 2020. All the same, I’m happy as a man watching society collapse around him can be about seeing the Timbers play to a promising level against a team like that; in particular, the fact that Portland matched past bludgeonings by three other teams helps me see them as viably competitive, because there's a little of keeping up with the Joneses in doing the same damage to a team that that just doesn't know what's doing out there. To put San Jose to bed, sometimes a team can’t wash off the stink. Sometimes a man loses his job. The larger point is to keep their failures separate from Portland's successes, at least to some extent.

Also, and at the same time, don't be an asshole, me, and enjoy a runaway success!! The Timbers won tonight and isn’t that the real story (shithead)? About that…

First things first, I call this Diego Valeri’s best game of 2020 hands down. When the Timbers needed inspiration, the Maestro lead the charge. I want to believe there was a moment where Valeri visited Sebastian Blanco in the hospital, and then Blanco begged him to carry the team forward for one more season until he can return to carry forward the honorific, El Maestro, for as many seasons as he can, at which he’ll pass it down to the next generation. Some nuns weep in the background, the lamentations shake the heavens, etc. But I digress…

Valeri looked spry in a way I haven’t seen so far this season, and on both sides of the ball. My little soap opera aside, if you’re not fretting about the number of consecutive games Valeri can manage without universally cramping, you’re falling short of coping with present realities. On the plus side, he still has more than just moments; Valeri can have entire nights, and that's very reassuring going forward. He'll still need to maximize those moments and space them out as needed - i.e., both coach and player need to make whatever arrangements they can to keep the best-possible Timbers’ attack on the field and scoring all the goals it can and being the very best that it can be, God bless G. I. Joe. The main thing is, celebrate every goddamn night that Valeri kills it between tonight and retirement. You had the privilege of watching one of the best players in Major League Soccer history and for as long as he’s been in Oregon. Sorry if I’ve said that before.

The same goes for Diego Chara, one of the best players at his position in MLS history. Portland has Blanco for a couple more seasons, plus Jeremy Ebobisse, Eryk Williamson, probably Bill Tuiloma; hell, even Cascante held up smartly tonight and tell me you don’t want to believe every time you see that. There’s a core in there, at least for as long as they can keep it together, and it’s good, competitive and, as someone who watches FC Cincinnati week in and out, I cannot over-emphasize the simple, uncomplicated delight of simple entertainment. Guys…Timbers fans have been pretty goddamn lucky...

Now, some detailed pot-shots

- Because some number of people have him on my mind, I clocked Cristhian Paredes a little more tonight than I usually do. My big thought there is that he looks more comfortable with a safety net and/or a specific (aggressive) defensive posture. I don’t think there’s a world in which he’ll ever be a No. 6 and, for what it’s worth, I’d call tonight his peak for playmaking, so…what do you do with a player like that?

- I don’t need to rush Ivacic (age 26), but I was perfectly comfortable with him tonight. Perfectly.

- Related, and loosely, maybe the Timbers can’t rotate an entire squad, but they show reasonable signs of staying genuinely competitive with a blend of regular starters and some, but, crucially, not all of the supporting cast. I think this is the real world for a while and, honestly, I stand by...paragraph 10 (I think) above. Portland has laid the foundation for a future, near as I can tell. So like as they can keep it all together and do the proper maintenance and adjustments, the future looks good.

- Farfan has impressed me every time he’s lined up. To see him do just as well on his wrong side of the field. I’m sold.

- Going the other way, Tomas Conechny…I dunno, man, I dunno.

- Whoops, one more: I didn't pick apart the goals in the above like I usually do, something that probably goes back to not fully trusting the result. The Timbers' attack has been good and all, but...I did, however, want to note that Cascante's goal gave me a little flutter, even if it was late and little meaningless (well, in the grand scheme, it got Portland's goal differential back to 0). He puts in the work, he gets the reward.

 

At the end of the day (and curse the internet and England for killing that phrase), I think Portland has a fair shot at winning the janky, drunk-with-asterisks trophy Major League Soccer passes out for winning a broke-dick tournament during a broke-dick year. This isn’t the world we want, it’s the world we live in. But, yes, I'll absolutely take it and wrap it in metaphors.