Portland Timbers 2020 Retrospective: The Season I Let Jesus Take the Wheel...and How the Car Wound Up in the Ditch

I still feel good overall. (Nailed it!)

Fucked up year, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just thinking that reminds me of the ads at the beginning of the lockdowns when all the commercials included some perfunctory spin on the phrase, “as we go together through these [random adjective generator for new/difficult] times.”

It’s fitting there, though, because for the first time I can remember, I more or less shut down the critical capacities in my brain fairly early into the 2020 season and just decided to believe everything would work out just fine. Maybe that goes back to some lizard-brain coping mechanism of basically going limp in the face of danger (e.g., the way I quietly muttered, “oh well,” as my car slid into a ditch just before last Christmas), but I think something simpler suggested the choice.

I’ve insisted that either or both Diego Chara’s or Diego Valeri’s legs would give out “this year” for longer than I should have - and it’s always been Valeri’s that set off the most agist-predictive concern. I didn’t recall what numbers Valeri posted in 2020 till I checked (8 goals, 7 assists) and, sure, they had to manage his minutes, but the former came in higher and the latter didn’t stop him from continuing to serve as both key cog and inspiration for the Timbers - and his set-pieces (corners, in particular) have never looked better. Chara, meanwhile…maybe he can keep retirement eternally at bay by tackling that shit before it sees him coming.

It absolutely didn’t hurt that every player Portland signed ahead of 2020 worked out well or better. Felipe Mora never looked like much, but maybe that’s the same voodoo he uses to lull defenses asleep (and does he double in size when shielding the ball? And do defenders’ eyes somehow see the same thing?) I remember Jaroslaw Niezgoda looking on the verge of passing out after scoring his first goal for the Timbers (what? he came in with a heart issue), but, until his knee blew up toward the end of the season, he showed he could score all kinds of ways and his combination-play added still more fluidity to a much smarter and trickier Timbers attack. Yimmi Chara looked like a miss at the start of the season, but found both feet in time to hold Portland’s attack together as a succession of injuries took one player after another out of the team. On the other end of the field, and no disrespect to Bill Tuiloma, Dario Zuparic gave Larrys Mabiala his missing partner in central defense…also, hold that thought…

It’s likelier still that the sense of calm and belief came to me after Sebastian Blanco’s (just worried about one of his legs giving out) MVP performance carried the Portland Timbers to what-better-motherfucking-be the only pandemic trophy in MLS history, the MWoMLS Chalice (one last time that's the Magical World of Major League Soccer Chalice). If, like me, you expected the Second Wave of COVID, the Timbers’ inspired run through the Orlando tournament paired wonderfully with the warm summer weather to lighten the pandemic’s middle passage. It was a like coming up for air between the early, truly freaky oh-my-fucking-God-what-is-happening days of the March and April and the (as I saw it) inevitable holing-up to follow. I barely remembered the first-round games - wins over, first the Los Angeles Galaxy, then the Houston Dynamo, followed by a draw against (still-) league-darlings, Los Angeles FC - but the way Portland stormed through the tournament’s final phase leant an air of inevitability to the final win over (default) tournament hosts, Orlando City SC. The comeback against New York City FC surprised me more than the rest, if only because Portland developed a knack for scoring first and early through most of 2020, as they did against both the Philadelphia Union in the MWoMLS semifinal (13th minute) and Orlando in the final (27th minute).

Despite the ample (and ongoing) bullshit in the world at large, I felt like I had a decent shot at a little jolt of happiness and normalcy every time I tuned into every Timbers game - something that lasted for the rest of the season (and God bless Happy Kalvin for providing the feeds when the regular channels tightened up). As anyone with a decent memory will have noticed by now, one game during the Orlando tournament went unmentioned in the above - the first-round game against FC Cincinnati, aka, the game that could have undone all of the above.

I’m not sure how many remember how close the Timbers came to getting tossed out of Orlando by league make-weights (and for the second season running), Cincinnati. After laboring…mightily to break through against Cincy’s (then and once) compact and determined defense, the Timbers finally went ahead and livened things up through Jaroslaw Niezgoda’s second goal of 2020. Fewer still might remember that Cincinnati had what looked like a goal disallowed for offside about five minutes earlier. The relief when Niezgoda’s goal went in, in other words, was palpable and sweaty. That left the Timbers just 23 minutes of defending against an attack feeble enough to sound like the stuff of legends…and then Steve Clark got caught dicking around with a back-pass and decided that straight-up tackling the player who showed him up was the best way to make it right. Cincinnati would equalize on the ensuing penalty kick (fun fact outside of southwestern Ohio: this gave Cincy’s Jurgen Locadia his only goal of 2020), but the Timbers survived extra-time and went on to bury every kick in the penalty shoot-out. And, to return to the script above, they’d take out one Eastern Conference team after another and lift the Holy MWoMLS Chalice when it was all over. And that’s when I just smiled and let Jesus take the wheel.

If winning the Orlando tournament was the plot of Portland’s 2020 season, the running theme of the late collapse became the sub-plot. I won’t say it started in that moment - e.g., doesn’t that implausible 4-4 home draw against Real Salt Lake shortly after Orlando make a stronger case? - and I appreciate the same goddamn thing caused Portland’s stumble at the first hurdle against FC Dallas in the MLS Cup Playoffs…but how real was The Late Collapse as a consistent phenomenon? And by what acts of masochism could I decide such a thing?

For the first attempt, I decided to watch every goal the Timbers defense allowed and, for the record, that wound up feeling like watching the one stupid/clumsy/awful mistake while ignoring the other 99 things everyone got right. The second and final model - e.g., watching the (approximately) four-minute highlight reels for each game - improves on that, in that you see the good things as well, but never on the defensive end. Flaws, masochism and all, that’s what I went with and that’s what I’ll focus/obsess on for the rest of this 2020 Timbers retrospective. It wasn’t a useless exercise, but…

I actually want to start with that season-killing late goal against FC Dallas and for two reasons: 1) it’s important to appreciate the random, blind luck that allowed it to happen. Pepi’s goal came in the 93rd minute, punishingly close after the beautifully-worked Jorge Villafana goal that gave the Timbers the lead. That said, consider the sequence: on a late goal-kick, Steve Clark boots the ball into Dallas’ half; two players contest the ball, but the Dallas defender wins it, knocking it forward, and fairly blindly; the ball falls to a Dallas player who hoofs it - entirely blindly, over his shoulder - behind Portland’s defense; Pepi breaks the second the ball goes over and beats the Timbers defense to the ball, leaving him one-v-one against Clark; he beats him, the game goes into extra-time, and we all remember who it ended, even those of us who had to refresh our memories the morning after.

On the one hand, how random is that goal? How many different bounces would have made it impossible? Going the other way, how bad was Portland at emergency defending when they had to recover toward their own goal? To answer my own question, that specific failure didn’t actually show up that much in the tally: I counted five times by what I’ll have to admit is a highly-subjective method…just trust me when I say it looked like unholy greased-hog wrestling every time it did.

To continue with some context: the final standings say that Portland allowed 35 goals in 2020; I watched 36, which I assume means the fatal one allowed in the playoffs didn’t count toward that (but the five allowed in the playoff rounds of MWoMLS did? maybe?). The average for goals allowed across the league was 32.12 - and, for what it’s worth, the Eastern Conference average was 29.92 while the Western Conference allowed a heavier 34.67…which the Timbers got on the wrong side of by a whisker. Broadly, then, Portland was not a great defensive team in 2020. The more pertinent question: how many times did a late goal kill them last season?

Here’s what I counted: the Timbers allowed late goals 16 times in 2020 (or thereabouts, a phrase I’d encourage a reader to add with every number provided herein). Now, the sharper question: how many times did those late goals hurt them? Here, I counted eleven times, but that’s with counting two games twice. First, the 0-3 home loss to the Seattle Sounders back in August, which was more a matter of piling on the original blow of Raul Ruidiaz’s first goal in the 72nd minute, a goal that had undone what had been a stronger performance by Portland to that point; moreover, those two goals came just over ten minutes later and only two apart, thereby killing off any hope of recovery. The second game was the RSL draw mentioned above and, there, only one goal tied the game (Sam Johnson's), but, seeing as Giuseppe Rossi’s goal, just four minutes earlier and at the 90th minute mark, was the necessary prelude to the other, I’m going to allow it and call it an even 10 times that late collapses by Portland cost them either points or a result. As for the rest, they happened, say, when Houston pulled back a goal on a late stupid hand-ball, or Chicharito opened his piddling 2020 account with a late, meaningless goal the game prior (and he boned a PK earlier to boot), or when LAFC added a late capper to a 4-2 back in September, or when the same struggling Galaxy scored a late second in a 5-2 blowout loss to the Timbers in late October.

What really killed Portland was the increasing frequency of those late collapses toward the end of the season - e.g., Christian Torres equalizing in the 93rd minute for LAFC on October 18, or Will Bruin chiming in at the same minute just four days later, or Kellyn Acosta bagging the winner for the Colorado Rapids at the 83rd minute in early November. Each of those games knocked points off the Timbers overall tally and kept them out of first place in the West, but they still finished the season on 39 points, losing out to Seattle and Sporting Kansas City on points-per-game - and, probably, a weaker goal differential.

It’s that last detail that tells the real story of Portland’s 2020. The broad reality is that Portland had the second-weakest defense of the Western Conference playoff teams, and by a fair amount; only LAFC allowed more goals (39), and half of those teams held a nine-goal or better advantage over them on goals allowed. Another thing to note: the Timbers managed only five clean sheets all season - two of them against the (frankly hapless) VancouverWhitecaps (Nashville SC, Seattle and the San Jose Earthquakes were the other three). The point of all that: nearly every time Portland played last season, they allowed at least one goal.

The obvious corollary: Portland would struggle any time they couldn’t score more than one goal. And, that late, sweet blowout over LA excepted, that’s exactly what happened down the stretch - especially when they lined up against the West’s defensively sturdier teams, e.g., Dallas, Seattle, and even Colorado. And the scoring dried up for obvious reasons: they survived surprisingly well after Blanco went down, but once Niezgoda’s knee blew up, and then a concussion limited Jeremy Ebobisse, and there was managing Valeri’s minutes on top of all that, plus line-up changes in the midfield when, say, Chara got suspended, or when Eryk Williamson had to sit out this game or that (the second and fourth goals in the 2-4 loss at LAFC are great examples of how messed up the midfield shape got without the regular starting pairing of Chara and Williamson). The goals dried up as the injuries piled on, basically, which goes some way to explaining why Villafana scored the last two goals of 2020 (which isn't to say both were not very, very delightful).

I left a lot unsaid in all the above - e.g., not a word about Williamson’s breakout season, or the regression for players like Cristhian Paredes and Marvin Loria - and all that certainly mattered, but a couple more details stood out among the goals Portland allowed. First (and, again, the count is loose and/or subjective), but if there’s an area in defense that needs addressing, I’d point to the twenty-seven (27) goals that came from the attacker’s left, aka, the right of Portland’s defense. They came in countless ways - e.g., Nani getting around the corner, Cristian Pavon doing the same over and over, Diego Rossi getting an easy overlap, or just corners and free-kicks that came from that side of the field - but, even if I’m off on the total, 27 of 36 is beyond a statistical anomaly. Another one: during the October 22 for Seattle v. Portland, the broadcast booth noted that Portland were tied for the worst set-piece defending on the season - and small wonder given how the number of times they got beat by teams isolating a player on the back-post; LAFC’s Mark-Anthony Kaye did it twice (here and here), as did RSL’s Damir Kreilach (here and here), if with some variation.

Apart from the epilogue, I think that’s everything. All in all, I think it’s more important to recognize that Portland has a broad defensive issue - e.g., they allow too many goals (a lot of them from the left) - than it is to focus on the specific issue of allowing late goals. No less important, I’m still happy with the 2020 season. Despite all the ups and downs, it really was the bright spot described all the way up the beginning, that little jolt of happiness and normalcy during a very fucked up year.

Apart from the general absence of crowds (and the jarring presence of them in some markets) and the frankly insane pace of it, the rest of the 2020 season didn’t feel so different than any other season. Teams played home and away - except the Canadian teams, obviously, who had to set up various residencies in States-side venues to continue - they got results, most of which made sense, etc. The league confined them to regional opposition to cut down on travel, which in Portland’s case meant seeing a lot of the Seattle Sounders, the San Jose Earthquakes, both Los Angeles teams (FC and Galaxy), Real Salt Lake to a lesser extent, but also the Vancouver Whitecaps as opponents and occasional “hosts” at Providence Park. (In all honesty, I never noticed Vancouver hosting anything and forgot the whole happened until I checked back on that game in late September, when Vancouver played as the home team at Providence Park.) That set up some strange dynamics between and among Portland and the opposition. For instance, Portland wound up playing the two strongest teams out of that group - LAFC and Seattle - either even (against LAFC, the 4-2 loss notwithstanding) or to their advantage (Portland took the seasons series against Seattle by 2-1-1 - and that 0-3 loss was flukier than it looked). Despite bad results against both, they basically owned the Galaxy and the Earthquakes and appeared able to score at will against both (here and here for the Galaxy, and here and here for San Jose). They reliably won very dull games against Vancouver, but they could never quite figure out RSL, who were the only team that reliably gave Portland fits in 2020.

That’s it for 2020, and just two days into 2021. Between COVID, the slow vaccine rollout and the League invoking the force majeure clause of the CBA, it’s not clear what the 2021 season will look like, or even whether MLS fans will see one at all. I have a broad preference on all that, basically, that it’s past due that the wealthiest Americans at long fucking last take a hit they can actually feel for the rest of America, because all that wealth up top hasn’t trickled down for fucking anything in my lifetime, and for any reason. With that in mind, I’d like to extend my personal appreciation to everyone who kept the “in a season when Merritt Paulson is losing money hand-over-fist” bit going throughout the 2020 season. That was one of my personal highlights, without question.

Here’s to 2021, assuming we get one. Until the first kicks of preseason…