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.

The latter dried up bit by bit as Vancouver pushed their line of engagement higher and started generally clogging up the passing lanes, especially across the center of the field. Gumming up the midfield got Vancouver back in the game, and left the Timbers working too hard for the rare jailbreaks where they actually threatened the ‘Caps goal. The service to Mora, who looked sharp the first few times he got on the ball, dried up almost entirely; rare/impressive flurries aside, the Timbers couldn’t get the ball over the center stripe for large stretches between the 25th and 80th minute. And that’s where the central thesis about tonight’s win takes off…

Portland’s spine held firm tonight and, in my mind, that’s the only thing you really need to think about. Zuparic and Mabiala, with Chara in front of them and Clark behind them, saved Portland’s skins tonight. Bonilla gave them some things to manage - a fair amount of the danger came from the flanks, in the first half, especially - but the Timbers managed nearly everything that broke into their defensive third, and that’s more or less what happened tonight. And on Wednesday, only a little better, because visibly worse team…and yet that visibly worse team got off some shots, so...

The fact that Gio Savarese got away with fielding an incoherent line-up is tonight’s dirty little secret. Once you get past the back four and Diego Chara, what you really had was an unruly mob with Mora at the top of it. Of which, thank the fucking gods that Mora scored early, because it didn’t take long for the incoherence to come to the fore…where it can’t be missed.

The issue follows from starting Paredes, Andy Polo, and Marvin Loria in the same starting XI. I could be alone in this, but they all seem to play in some deeply uncomfortable interpretation of the same position. For lack of better phrasing, I’d say they all look like decent soccer players on the raw skillz side (even if Polo’s “speed” got hella over-sold), but not a single one of them looks at home in the roles they’ve been asked to play in the currently-existing Portland Timbers system. And, yes, that could be a very long way of saying all three of those players suck, but I also know all three of them could have lapped me four times over in my playing prime and, based on my own experience with several teams, sometimes they don’t put your where you do your best, aka, you don’t fit the scheme of the team you’re on, etc.

Bottom line, and setting aside any specific thing that happened tonight, someone among Polo, Paredes, Loria and Renzo Zambrano will shortly present as surplus to requirements. None of them have shown any specific upside so far and, when they’re defensive game tops out at box-to-box useful, your job description just became vague to the point of uselessness. All the same, they did their real job tonight, which is something I lose track of way too often. Nit-picking aside, the Timbers landed two wins tonight: three points plus rest for several of their key players. That’s just winning across the board and in any way you count it. As threatening as the ‘Caps looked here and there tonight, the box score reflects a feeble outing for them; for all the times they rolled the Timbers out of possession in their own half, Portland’s diamond of defending (e.g., Clark, Mabiala, Zuparic, and (Diego) Chara) kept them at bay.

I’m willing to extend credit to players all around those four - e.g., both fullbacks had strong moments tonight (even if I counted more for Marco Farfan), and keeping a team who holds the upper hand for 45 minutes of a game at bay takes at least some members of a village - but I remain deeply unconvinced, or have moved in that direction, on Paredes, Polo and Loria. They each played their role tonight, and it’s an important one, but I’d prefer a rotation that can deliver more than rest for the starters. To delve a little more deeply/sharply, I’m willing to give Loria more time. The other two? I don’t think they’re bad players - and, honestly, I wouldn’t be stunned in Paredes didn’t turn around - but I think they’re both on the wrong team.

Eryk Williamson presents the more complicated case, especially after tonight’s first half. After being stellar over the game’s first 15 minutes, Williamson vanished…if for the next 30 minutes. But I have those 15 minutes and I’ve got the first part of this season, and both of those, when combined, point me toward an argument that, 1) Williamson looks like a good piece for the team, and 2) he’ll be better paired with the right person. By which I mean, when you go shopping for better parts, it’s a really good idea to think about them in the context of the players you intend to keep around…

…I speak from painful experience on that one. I still watch FC Cincinnati every week. And I have still never seen a roster build that awful. Put it this way: if you still think Gavin Wilkinson sucks, you have no fucking idea how dark it can get.

As I type, the Portland Timbers sit at second place in the Western Conference, tied on points with (the, frankly, motherfucking) Seattle Sounders, but with a massive, yet positive deficit in goal differential (+3 for Portland versus something like +17 for Seattle). That specific situation aside, Portland has an eight-point lead on the best team under the playoff line in the Western Conference, so Portland looks good for the playoffs, if nothing else. Moreover, San Jose and Vancouver both have goal differentials that, when compared to Portland’s current +3, more or less blot out whatever sun could fall on either of them - e.g., -20 for the former, and -14 for the latter. At time of writing…

Bottom-line, Portland looks more and more likely to clear the laughably low bar they’ll need to clear to make it into the MLS playoffs. That said, the question is the same as it every damn season: how do you feel now, right now, going into the post-season.

That’s my lens for what happened tonight. For the time being, I see a road that only travels so far.