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.

Not All Goals Are Created Equal, Obviously…
So, what the hell happened to make a team that…more or less won MLS Is Back on the back of its defense to the team that couldn’t stop giving up goals for the past three games? On a surface level, it was a lot of failure to clear against Real Salt Lake in their 4-4 draw (“in Portland”); the Timbers also got sloppy while hosting the Los Angeles Galaxy, mostly by letting a fullback get isolated against a better player and giving another player too much room in Zone 14. They also lost to the Sounders during that stretch - badly, too. What’s noteworthy there is how much their first and third goals looked a lot like what the Sounders tried tonight - and also how quickly that approach did and did not dry up.

All in all, I think the Timbers got very lucky. They could have been down 1-2 at the half, even 1-3, and playing a team like Seattle on level terms is very different from playing them a goal or two down - and that very much includes the Timbers, if not more so. The largest point: in the nearest of terms, the Timbers figured out a way to contain the team that was right in front of them. Moreover, there is probably no team on the fucking planet that the Timbers know better than the Sounders and vice versa. This is also why I think the U.S. Open Cup is sort of a curse. Familiarity can only breed contempt for so long...

The rest of my notes have to do with where I think the Timbers are, again, rn. In no particular order…

Can the Timbers Make It Without Sebastian Blanco?
Probably not, if I’m being honest. That’s barring a revelation - which I am very open to - but, at time of writing, I’d have to see more of the Timbers playing without him, and well…say, more of what happened against Seattle tonight.

How About Larrys? And Do I Really Care?
I don’t know how long the injuries to Blanco and Mabiala will last, but I do have an oddly sanguine theory about the Timbers on both ends of the bench.

Because Blanco’s the harder case, I’m going to start with Mabiala. First things first, can he be replaced entirely? Long answer short, yes and no. And here’s why, in two parts:

YES: Dario Zuparic has essentially aggressive characteristics while Tuiloma does not; that means you have depth. Tuiloma and Zuparic can work....allegedly...

NO: Zuparic has to share defensive duties with someone who is less aggressive or…well, I’m really not sure, while also expecting more goals against. Also, where does Julio Cascante really fall on this spectrum?

As to my larger point, I believe the Timbers have good (enough) depth in central defense on the roster right now, it’s just a question of how they deploy it. All that’s to say, I can see how the Timbers’ defense works without Mabiala (no matter how much I want him back), while being less sure about how Portland mounts an attack without 2020’s spark-plug extraordinaire, Sebastian Blanco.

Back to the Original Question…
I think, yes, and I also think this is the key to whatever near-term success the Timbers have. The Timbers have weird and cluttered selection of attacking options right now, so, in one sense, the more injuries the merrier. To give one example, if you start Jaroslaw Niezgoda at forward and Jeremy Ebobisse on the wing, as the Timbers did tonight, what really happens when Niezgoda goes down? Ebobisse slots to fowrard...only does he, or does Mora start over him? It's a mess, basically, but there's also a relatively easy logic to how Gio can move things around, which is useful, if somewhat untested in  practical terms. Niezgoda and Mora are start to look more and more like viable options, the less I worry about this player or that going down, or just resting players as a good, wise and virtuous team would.

There's a weird shit-stack at forward in Portland, basically, that hasn't shaken itself entirely out. I don’t see the near-term solution/logic to having Niezoda, Mora and Ebobisse on the roster, at least where each player is concerned. Which brings us to…

The State of the Transition
I mean, this is the whole goddamn dilemma, is it not? Can the Timbers get from the Valeri, Blanco, Chara era - also, where, oh, where is that long-term centerback? - to the next generation of Major League Soccer without pissing away two-three years on aging knees or, honestly, something more desperate and therefore worse? Do I think the signs are good? No idea, but it sounds like one hell of a poll.

Conclusion
Honestly, I think Portland’s killing it for a relatively small market. I’ll start to worry on a fundamental level when that dries up.