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| It only looks innocent. |
Huh, maybe I should title all these things in three word descriptions. Beats repeating cliches like, “a tale of two halves,” right?
The game started cagey, it took a moment of horror - and, arguably, a substitution - to change it, but, once the ball got rolling, gravity did its thing and Portland Timbers coasted to a 3-0 win over the Los Angeles Galaxy at home.
LA’s Derrick Williams brought the horror, and by way of what might have been a drunken-headed tackle a couple minutes before half-time that knocked Portland’s Andy Polo out of the game and off the field for gods know how long. It left LA and everyone associated with them blushing instead of complaining - a rarity in soccer - and Williams got a straight, justified red for it; fines and a couple more missed games should be coming as well. Regardless of whether Williams had a concussion at the time, that kind of tackle all but obliges you to make amends. Visit Polo to apologize, buy him a box of chocolates (the good stuff; not that See’s bullshit), maybe gift card to Dave & Buster’s with $200 on it, and that’s at a minimum. Williams’ tackle was the house-guest equivalent of shitting in the middle of someone’s kitchen; mens rea doesn’t even come into it.
That came just before the end of the first half, and the Wheels of Justice turned quickly from there. Less than two minutes after the second half whistle, Josecarlos Van Rankin dropped a dime into an arm’s length gap between LA’s Daniel Steres and (maybe) Julian Araujo for Felipe Mora to nod into the goal - and the Timbers…well, they didn’t quite never look back, but they took care of the game in one of the weirdest and most passive ways I’ve seen in a while. Allow me to explain…
Looking at the summary, I see that just 13 minutes passed between Mora’s first goal and his second - a head-on-a-swivel-alert put-back on a nice bit of collective lock-picking by Portland, in which a strong shot by Claudio Bravo set up Mora’s put-back - but something truly peculiar made that dozen-plus minutes pass slowly. For one, the Timbers did something familiar after going ahead: they let up. That could have followed from a conscious choice to drop back, stay compact and absorb, but it had the effect of giving the Galaxy, not just possession, but time to pick at the edges of the Timbers’ defensive third. While I don’t recall anything super dangerous during that time - related, I just confirmed that Logan Ketterer didn’t make a lot of saves, but that’s still three more than I remembered - LA had the ball in an area where control becomes chaos in the blink of an eye.
For my money, LA never threatened after the first half, which begs the question of how much that ultimately mattered (see next paragraph), but the Timbers still took their damn time to put them under pressure. This wasn’t a cat toying with a mouse, because there was no sense a kill was coming until it did; more often, it took the form of about three Portland players setting up little tea parties around the midfield stripe at politely putting it amongst themselves while LA collectively looked in a tense keyed-up posture, like AI characters in a video game that haven’t yet been activated. Check my twitter thread, and you’ll see at least two tweets’ worth of free-floating anxiety. On the other hand, lo and behold, both Portland’s second and third goals followed from somnolent spells of possession…and I’ll get to the third goal shortly, but this is important (and I’ve already foreshadowed it).
Just as important, the Timbers kept a clean sheet for the second week in a row; better, they never looked like giving up more than one goal today. I give Dario Zuparic a lot of credit for this. He’s a front-foot defender by nature - e.g., he’s good at batting away those hopeful entry balls that lead to cascading breakdowns - but his feet look a little more under him this season, as if he’s got a better read on the opposition around MLS. At this point, I’d call him the Timbers’ best defender. Better still, he had a lot of help today: Bill Tuiloma was just Bill this week (a compliment, btw) and both Van Rankin and Claudio Bravo looked better and more connected this week than they have over the past couple; for me, Bravo had his best game as a Timber today. Together with (mainly) Eryk Williamson, they did a good job of keeping LA out of the central channels and generally limiting LA to varieties of crossing. Most of all, how many times did you see Chicharito touch the ball today? The Galaxy could find Kevin Cabral and Samuel Grandsir (for as long as he was out there; early sub), and I’d say Sebastian Lletget saw a fair amount of the ball, as well, but the “Little Pea”? Apart from that time I saw him stand up and dust himself off in the second half, I don’t remember a thing about Javier Hernandez today. To point out the obvious, any day you take a marquee player out of the game is a good day.
To point to…less a worry than a concern, the Timbers kinda needed that today. While they turned it up over the last 10 minutes of the first half - e.g., Jeremy Ebobisse running behind LA’s too high line, that Diego Valeri shot off some shoddy play by LA, and that later shot he got off a feed from Van Rankin, any of which should have made the xG monitors perk up - Portland looked a couple miles south of sharp for most of the first half. They ceded too much of the initiative (that’s initiative, not possession) to LA for the first 30 minutes and, when they got a player looking forward in the middle of the field, he didn’t seem to know where to go with it too often. A couple things caused it - for one, Dairon Asprilla looked like the guy coaches dust off every fall instead of a regular contributor - but I’m also not sure I didn’t see something I made fun of in a pre-game tweet. I’ll be damned if I didn’t see Polo as the Timber furthest up-field 3-5 times in the first half.
I scoffed (publicly) when the Opta showed Polo lined up as a forward, but that might have captured both the reality and the confusion in Portland’s attack during the first half. While I think everyone agreed Valeri played something like a false nine, I saw Asprilla and/or Ebobisse defending like wingers often as I saw Valeri and Polo (but, significantly, never Yimmi Chara) putting the sporadic pressure on the Galaxy’s first or second passer out of the back. And yet, when it came to getting chances, I saw Ebobisse and Asprilla getting on the end of a final ball (sometimes, with the ball going from Ebobisse to Asprilla) more often than I saw Valeri and Polo. That’s a long way of saying it was kind of a scrambled attack, whether by design or not, and it only sporadically pointed anything sharp toward LA’s goal…
…at least until Mora came on. To paraphrase Elf, I’m in love with Felipe Mora and I don’t care who knows.
When I talked about a substitution arguably changing the game, that sub was Mora. Once he came on, he gave the Timbers attack the North Star it needed; his post-up play allowed the ball to go into LA’s defense, but only so far back out and with the Timbers still in control. And, when the ball got deep, the Timbers did a good job of cinching the noose around LA’s defense until it broke. Portland knocked the ball in, back, in again, then wide, not always going anywhere, but consistently one step ahead of LA. That’s how the second goal happened, anyway. To finally get to the third, that’s the first of my talking points.
- The penalty kick awarded to Portland at the 68th minute occasioned two controversies. First, was that a penalty? My answer, eh, close enough. Even with light contact, LA’s Daniel Steres obstructed Van Rankin’s run at the very least, and with intent to play the man, not the ball; so, yeah, I call that a penalty. A local question might have been bigger: why didn’t Mora take the kick? It would have given Mora something precious and rare among Timbers: a hat trick. For what it’s worth, I get that argument and I don’t. On the one hand, sure, hat tricks are neat; on the other, does it matter who scored a goal so long as it gets scored? I’m already in that camp on purely utilitarian grounds and I saw a “greater good” win in giving that kick/goal to Valeri as well: if there’s a better method for restoring confidence in someone who missed a penalty kick, oooohhh, I don’t know when, I don’t know it. I don’t know how often we’ll see Valeri this season. Overall, I’d say he’s transitioning from consistently dangerous to opportunistic already this season (he got chances; see above), but I still want to see him both seizing and being given every decisive moment he can get until either his age or rate of failure makes that a bad idea. So long as Gio’s playing him, the sharper, the better.
- Logan Ketterer was good again tonight, but I’ll still say this: he hasn’t lost Portland a game yet, but I don’t think he’s won one for them yet (and, yes(sssss), I remember the PK save last week). And I’ll take that, he’s good enough. I don't demand anything from goalkeepers beyond competence.
- Track Van Rankin’s position when Portland gets into the attack. More than once today, I saw him stake out a weak-side central position about 15-20 yards behind the front of the attack. My take-away: it is understood he is part of the attack when Portland has the ball in the attacking third. I’m starting to wonder if the same doesn’t apply to Bravo - who I also saw in advance positions today - but the whole thing speaks well of Portland’s commitment to getting players into the attack and keeping a second wave in place to keep it in there. It’s a good formula.
- I think I mentioned it above, but I want to say it again: Portland didn’t give LA a lot to work with in the central part of its entire half of the field. Credit to Williamson and Yimmi. And probably Polo to some extent.
- To close out on a downer, Asprilla showed why he’s a bench player/motivational figure today: his two looks at goal aside, he provided less than enough on both sides of the ball today. To the extent Marvin Loria replaced him, I’d say the same thing applied. He killed at least three plays from fear of using his right foot and his decision making takes far too much damn time. Asprilla is Asprilla - i.e., I don’t worry about him, but just accept his (literally) odd contributions - but some part of me always saw Loria as the future…and I don’t want that future.
That’s an appropriately small gripe because, how the hell does one complain about a 3-0 win? All in all, I’m encouraged enough by what I saw at the end of the first half to believe that Portland would have improved once Mora took the field regardless. Assuming I saw what I think I did during the first half - i.e., an almost Dutch kind of fluidity in who did what when it comes to pressure/attacking - that’s an experiment I would encourage, and on the grounds of potential. If they can pull it together, that would raise a ceiling that already looks pretty high for 2021.
Till the next one..
The game started cagey, it took a moment of horror - and, arguably, a substitution - to change it, but, once the ball got rolling, gravity did its thing and Portland Timbers coasted to a 3-0 win over the Los Angeles Galaxy at home.
LA’s Derrick Williams brought the horror, and by way of what might have been a drunken-headed tackle a couple minutes before half-time that knocked Portland’s Andy Polo out of the game and off the field for gods know how long. It left LA and everyone associated with them blushing instead of complaining - a rarity in soccer - and Williams got a straight, justified red for it; fines and a couple more missed games should be coming as well. Regardless of whether Williams had a concussion at the time, that kind of tackle all but obliges you to make amends. Visit Polo to apologize, buy him a box of chocolates (the good stuff; not that See’s bullshit), maybe gift card to Dave & Buster’s with $200 on it, and that’s at a minimum. Williams’ tackle was the house-guest equivalent of shitting in the middle of someone’s kitchen; mens rea doesn’t even come into it.
That came just before the end of the first half, and the Wheels of Justice turned quickly from there. Less than two minutes after the second half whistle, Josecarlos Van Rankin dropped a dime into an arm’s length gap between LA’s Daniel Steres and (maybe) Julian Araujo for Felipe Mora to nod into the goal - and the Timbers…well, they didn’t quite never look back, but they took care of the game in one of the weirdest and most passive ways I’ve seen in a while. Allow me to explain…
Looking at the summary, I see that just 13 minutes passed between Mora’s first goal and his second - a head-on-a-swivel-alert put-back on a nice bit of collective lock-picking by Portland, in which a strong shot by Claudio Bravo set up Mora’s put-back - but something truly peculiar made that dozen-plus minutes pass slowly. For one, the Timbers did something familiar after going ahead: they let up. That could have followed from a conscious choice to drop back, stay compact and absorb, but it had the effect of giving the Galaxy, not just possession, but time to pick at the edges of the Timbers’ defensive third. While I don’t recall anything super dangerous during that time - related, I just confirmed that Logan Ketterer didn’t make a lot of saves, but that’s still three more than I remembered - LA had the ball in an area where control becomes chaos in the blink of an eye.
For my money, LA never threatened after the first half, which begs the question of how much that ultimately mattered (see next paragraph), but the Timbers still took their damn time to put them under pressure. This wasn’t a cat toying with a mouse, because there was no sense a kill was coming until it did; more often, it took the form of about three Portland players setting up little tea parties around the midfield stripe at politely putting it amongst themselves while LA collectively looked in a tense keyed-up posture, like AI characters in a video game that haven’t yet been activated. Check my twitter thread, and you’ll see at least two tweets’ worth of free-floating anxiety. On the other hand, lo and behold, both Portland’s second and third goals followed from somnolent spells of possession…and I’ll get to the third goal shortly, but this is important (and I’ve already foreshadowed it).
Just as important, the Timbers kept a clean sheet for the second week in a row; better, they never looked like giving up more than one goal today. I give Dario Zuparic a lot of credit for this. He’s a front-foot defender by nature - e.g., he’s good at batting away those hopeful entry balls that lead to cascading breakdowns - but his feet look a little more under him this season, as if he’s got a better read on the opposition around MLS. At this point, I’d call him the Timbers’ best defender. Better still, he had a lot of help today: Bill Tuiloma was just Bill this week (a compliment, btw) and both Van Rankin and Claudio Bravo looked better and more connected this week than they have over the past couple; for me, Bravo had his best game as a Timber today. Together with (mainly) Eryk Williamson, they did a good job of keeping LA out of the central channels and generally limiting LA to varieties of crossing. Most of all, how many times did you see Chicharito touch the ball today? The Galaxy could find Kevin Cabral and Samuel Grandsir (for as long as he was out there; early sub), and I’d say Sebastian Lletget saw a fair amount of the ball, as well, but the “Little Pea”? Apart from that time I saw him stand up and dust himself off in the second half, I don’t remember a thing about Javier Hernandez today. To point out the obvious, any day you take a marquee player out of the game is a good day.
To point to…less a worry than a concern, the Timbers kinda needed that today. While they turned it up over the last 10 minutes of the first half - e.g., Jeremy Ebobisse running behind LA’s too high line, that Diego Valeri shot off some shoddy play by LA, and that later shot he got off a feed from Van Rankin, any of which should have made the xG monitors perk up - Portland looked a couple miles south of sharp for most of the first half. They ceded too much of the initiative (that’s initiative, not possession) to LA for the first 30 minutes and, when they got a player looking forward in the middle of the field, he didn’t seem to know where to go with it too often. A couple things caused it - for one, Dairon Asprilla looked like the guy coaches dust off every fall instead of a regular contributor - but I’m also not sure I didn’t see something I made fun of in a pre-game tweet. I’ll be damned if I didn’t see Polo as the Timber furthest up-field 3-5 times in the first half.
I scoffed (publicly) when the Opta showed Polo lined up as a forward, but that might have captured both the reality and the confusion in Portland’s attack during the first half. While I think everyone agreed Valeri played something like a false nine, I saw Asprilla and/or Ebobisse defending like wingers often as I saw Valeri and Polo (but, significantly, never Yimmi Chara) putting the sporadic pressure on the Galaxy’s first or second passer out of the back. And yet, when it came to getting chances, I saw Ebobisse and Asprilla getting on the end of a final ball (sometimes, with the ball going from Ebobisse to Asprilla) more often than I saw Valeri and Polo. That’s a long way of saying it was kind of a scrambled attack, whether by design or not, and it only sporadically pointed anything sharp toward LA’s goal…
…at least until Mora came on. To paraphrase Elf, I’m in love with Felipe Mora and I don’t care who knows.
When I talked about a substitution arguably changing the game, that sub was Mora. Once he came on, he gave the Timbers attack the North Star it needed; his post-up play allowed the ball to go into LA’s defense, but only so far back out and with the Timbers still in control. And, when the ball got deep, the Timbers did a good job of cinching the noose around LA’s defense until it broke. Portland knocked the ball in, back, in again, then wide, not always going anywhere, but consistently one step ahead of LA. That’s how the second goal happened, anyway. To finally get to the third, that’s the first of my talking points.
- The penalty kick awarded to Portland at the 68th minute occasioned two controversies. First, was that a penalty? My answer, eh, close enough. Even with light contact, LA’s Daniel Steres obstructed Van Rankin’s run at the very least, and with intent to play the man, not the ball; so, yeah, I call that a penalty. A local question might have been bigger: why didn’t Mora take the kick? It would have given Mora something precious and rare among Timbers: a hat trick. For what it’s worth, I get that argument and I don’t. On the one hand, sure, hat tricks are neat; on the other, does it matter who scored a goal so long as it gets scored? I’m already in that camp on purely utilitarian grounds and I saw a “greater good” win in giving that kick/goal to Valeri as well: if there’s a better method for restoring confidence in someone who missed a penalty kick, oooohhh, I don’t know when, I don’t know it. I don’t know how often we’ll see Valeri this season. Overall, I’d say he’s transitioning from consistently dangerous to opportunistic already this season (he got chances; see above), but I still want to see him both seizing and being given every decisive moment he can get until either his age or rate of failure makes that a bad idea. So long as Gio’s playing him, the sharper, the better.
- Logan Ketterer was good again tonight, but I’ll still say this: he hasn’t lost Portland a game yet, but I don’t think he’s won one for them yet (and, yes(sssss), I remember the PK save last week). And I’ll take that, he’s good enough. I don't demand anything from goalkeepers beyond competence.
- Track Van Rankin’s position when Portland gets into the attack. More than once today, I saw him stake out a weak-side central position about 15-20 yards behind the front of the attack. My take-away: it is understood he is part of the attack when Portland has the ball in the attacking third. I’m starting to wonder if the same doesn’t apply to Bravo - who I also saw in advance positions today - but the whole thing speaks well of Portland’s commitment to getting players into the attack and keeping a second wave in place to keep it in there. It’s a good formula.
- I think I mentioned it above, but I want to say it again: Portland didn’t give LA a lot to work with in the central part of its entire half of the field. Credit to Williamson and Yimmi. And probably Polo to some extent.
- To close out on a downer, Asprilla showed why he’s a bench player/motivational figure today: his two looks at goal aside, he provided less than enough on both sides of the ball today. To the extent Marvin Loria replaced him, I’d say the same thing applied. He killed at least three plays from fear of using his right foot and his decision making takes far too much damn time. Asprilla is Asprilla - i.e., I don’t worry about him, but just accept his (literally) odd contributions - but some part of me always saw Loria as the future…and I don’t want that future.
That’s an appropriately small gripe because, how the hell does one complain about a 3-0 win? All in all, I’m encouraged enough by what I saw at the end of the first half to believe that Portland would have improved once Mora took the field regardless. Assuming I saw what I think I did during the first half - i.e., an almost Dutch kind of fluidity in who did what when it comes to pressure/attacking - that’s an experiment I would encourage, and on the grounds of potential. If they can pull it together, that would raise a ceiling that already looks pretty high for 2021.
Till the next one..
Nice analysis of an interesting-to-watch win. And yes, if only Asprilla would sell his soul to whoever for a season's worth of clinical finishing... But, as you pretty much stated, he is who he is.
ReplyDeleteIt's not sad, but the aging of a gifted soccer player like Valeri makes me very aware of how short a time a pro has at the top of his game. We were SO lucky in retrospect that he completely healed from his ACL tear at the end of 2014.