MLS Weakly, Weeks 9 & 10: Super Standings...Because There Is No Form Guide

Whatever's behind that tree must kick total ass!

Because the content-makers at Major League Soccer HQ decided to discontinue the, frankly, fucking irreplaceable Form Guide, I made one of my own. (Yes, really.) With 10 games in the books for nearly every team in the league - the exceptions: FC Cincinnati, Real Salt Lake and the Colorado Rapids - and my homemade Form Guide for reference, I decided to skip the results rankings for this edition of the Weakly and to serve up of a “state of the league” thing instead. Which kind of sucks given that I’d already organized the results rankings for Week 9…c'est la vie, moving on.

I’m calling what’s below “Super Standings,” which are like the regular ol’ conference standings, only contextualized with details like results over the past 10 games and notes on strength of schedule; on that, I’m not going to type up the results and locale of every game played, but will cite examples that strike me as relevant. The basic idea is to interrogate the question of how every team in MLS is really doing. The last step is organizing the teams into three tiers:

Contending: teams that project as potential winners of MLS Cup or the Supporters’ Shield
Loitering: teams that project to make weight in the post-season, i.e., present, but non-competitive
The Presently-Irrelevant: a category that explains itself

It’ll make sense, honest.

Toronto FC 0-2 FC Cincinnati: Big Win! (& 280 Characters Is Too Limiting)

Who squares off against who matters.

I know. I know. Look, 280 characters is really confining. I tried. Once.

Overall
FC Cincinnati won its second straight (road?) game against Toronto FC (I asked the question because I’m not sure what mattered more, venue or opposition). The game ended 2-0 and Cincy never looked like losing. I reviewed the condensed game to confirm I wasn’t missing anything and, some half-chances on a couple set-pieces and a full chance Patrick Mullins absolutely should have buried aside, I did not. The box score backs it up as well.

Toronto was a mess yesterday and is a mess in general in the season’s early weeks. Moreover, I can’t see them turning it around. Players they rely on - e.g., Jonathan Osorio and Marky Delgado (in particular) - had horrible games and, to name and credit the one guy who looked good for them, I’d be pissed off if I was Chris Mavinga.

Oh, and I need to retract a tweet: Kenneth Vermeer was not pretty good; he flailed a lot, especially on crosses. That’s it for a summary, on to…

Five Thoughts
1) Who’s Next?
As MLS’s Matt Doyle noted yesterday, the first step to becoming a good team comes with beating bad/struggling teams. FC Cincinnati has done that twice now. As such, I’m excited to see them play different and slightly better teams - Houston on the road will do nicely - which will give Cincinnati fans a clearer benchmark for what’s starting to look like progress in 2021. Too many fans make the mistake of treating every game like the one before it, but there’s a world of difference between losing to New York City FC or Orlando on the road (because, good teams) and losing to, say, Inter Miami CF at home. The latter should surprise/anger you; the former, less so.

Portland Timbers 0-1 Minnesota United FC: Turns Out I Need More than 280 Characters...

Dreamin'...

Yeah, yeah. Twitter threads didn’t work - e.g., I couldn’t complete a thought on the racist taunt thing involving Diego Chara - so I’m back in this space. I’m keeping the concept, though: five thoughts and not much more than a page. Here goes.

Overall
The Portland Timbers lost a sweaty fucker 0-1 to Minnesota United FC. I watched the game live (can human sweat be repurposed to create renewable energy, if so…), but tucked low in a corner away from the Army. I didn’t have a great view, in other words. Minnesota looked the better from that angle - they created clearer openings, defenders in the right place, etc. - but the highlights gave me a better look at Portland’s chances. (No condensed game, dammit.) Based on what I saw and what’s in front of me, the game could have ended in a draw as easily as a 2-0 win for Minnesota. A Timbers win is the only thing I can’t pencil out of it. It was not a good week for the Timbers…

Five Thoughts
1) Racist Taunts and Getting Around a “He-Said/He-Said” Logjam
If I were running MLS’s investigation into the racist taunt at Diego Chara, I’d start from the fact that Chara has never made such a claim before (in my memory) and he’s been in MLS for nearly a decade. If any other player heard it, the onus for dismissing the claim would fall on Minnesota in my mind. My first question: why would he make this up now? Crime ‘n’ punishment-wise, you take the offending player’s denial into account - i.e., you can’t prove it one way or the other - and dish a punishment that, 1) makes it clear the league will punish that shit, and 2) don’t go as far as you would to punish a provable offense.

2) A Beer for Steve Clark, on the Defense
The Timbers defense got caught in rehearsal mode on the game’s deciding goal, but the Loons created two more wide-open looks that I would have forgiven Clark for missing. In those moments, he stood on his head to give the offense - no, the entire team - a chance to salvage a point or turn around the game. They did not. So, let’s look at that…

MLS Weakly, Week 8: Results Rankings/90% of the Narratives Hold

One of the metaphors.

After a weekend tossed by existential dread, I decided to continue with these league-wide wrap-ups. At the end of it all, the thing I decided I wanted to know most about the two teams I follow (again, that’s the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati) was the shape and size of what’s coming at them - and that means getting a reasonable handle on what’s going on around Major League Soccer.

Between the dread and the stupid-quick turn-around between Week 8 (my “MLS Weeks” will always end on Sundays), I got only a second-hand glance at the following games (links to match info are embedded in those scores, as they'll be throughout this post; c'mon, fact-check me):

Columbus Crew SC 2-0 Chicago Fire FC
DC United 1-0 Inter Miami CF
Los Angeles Galaxy 1-2 Seattle Sounders
Austin FC 0-0 San Jose Earthquakes

And I feel good about those choices, because: of course Columbus beat Chicago, who doesn’t; Miami is, by all accounts, fucking terrible, so how can that loss tell me anything about DC (even Matt Doyle’s weekly wrap confirmed DC played an uncharacteristic game); Austin is sputtering and San Jose is dying, next; all of which leaves LA’s home loss to Seattle as my only actual regret. For the purposes of the results rankings, just shuffle those four results to the bottom in the order suggested by those quick-hit notes.

I’ve listed the rest of Week 8’s results below in the order in which I think they bear noting - as always. Going into this weekend, I looked forward to all these games through three broad lenses: 1) of interest (as in, it looked like a good, potentially telling match-up); 2) make me care (i.e., one team or the other had to get my attention); and 3) obvious. And, in a new wrinkle, I included the pre-game note/question from my preview thread in each mini-review. Again (sigh!), everything written below is based on reviewing MLS-in-15 videos and giving the stats five minutes’ worth of attention; I call that my “Silver-Service Review,” and I bitch mightily when I want it but don’t get it (e.g., this week’s game of the week).

Only Columbus v. Chicago filed into that cabinet, so the rest fell into the other two. I’ve already noted two of the “make me care” games above - DC v Miami and Austin v San Jose - and they didn’t, but only one team in that group put in the work to make this angry coach/dad take notice: Real Salt Lake. The other game you’ll find damn close to the bottom, if not on it…like the losing team.

FC Cincinnati 0-2 Colorado Rapids: The Painful, Present Limits of Moral Victories

You know the sound it's making...

After FC Cincinnati’s 0-2 home loss to the Colorado Rapids, I have two competing thoughts in my head:

1) Cincinnati fans are expecting a lot of progress from basically zero in a little time; and
2) can you fucking blame them at this point?

I want to start all this by centering one very important thought: the Rapids are a good team and they’ve started strong to boot. Their players have their roles and they know them well, they’re good at nearly every position and, since Robin Fraser took over, they’ve become damned good at finding the next pass and the one after that. For further perspective: Colorado has the fourth best record in the whole damn league - and with a game or two in hand against every team above them. There’s no shame in losing to a team like that. With Cincinnati dancing on the edge of another missed ceiling, hell, yeah, the circumstances suck - I mean, they suck - and yet there’s nothing to do but play the next game.

That should not, however, dissuade any FC Cincy fans from letting loose their blazing frustration with a team that has spent two and…think that’s one-fifth seasons failing to gett it together. I saw little moral victories all over the place for Cincinnati yesterday - e.g., an early pass from Luciano Acosta to slip Brenner behind, which was as good as anything I’ve seen in open play all season; the way Cincinnati knocked the Rapids off their rhythm between the two goals; Alvaro Barreal turning in one of his most threatening performances so far, quite literally, etc. - and yet…and yet, the second half of the phrase “moral victory” fades with every game that doesn’t end in actual victory. They don't count in the standings, for one. I didn’t fully digest how many quality shots Cincinnati fired at William Yarbrough’s goal until I reviewed the tape (22 shots, for the record, with 7 forcing a save). It’s hard as hell to see a silver lining, especially with yet another three points thrown away.

The deeper question is when you’ll know they’ve turned things around, both collectively and a way that sticks. And that’s a far slippier question to answer.

Portland Timbers 2-1 Sporting Kansas City: Seeing a New Face in a Bad Mirror

An aesthetic and practical metaphor for Portland's defense.

You know what was most satisfying about the Portland Timbers temporally-vital 2-1 win over Sporting Kansas City last night?

Seeing the Timbers win the game on the kind of goal that ruined their 2020 season - and arguably the half season before that - was deeply satisfying, almost healing. The ball into the attacking third was good, but not spectacular, the ball after that was more hopeful than wise, but it still pipped through Andreau Fontas’s high five-hole, giving Marvin “Human Frustration” Loria the chance to run it down for something close to a tap-in. letting in that kind of messy shit has become Portland's stock-in-trade, but if SKC wants to take it off their hands, I'm good. That ugly bugger finished Portland’s come-back and gave me a flush of optimism for the season ahead. All in all, I’d call the win far more comfortable than pretty, but it wasn’t all that comfortable either, and that’s square one for my talking points:

“Something else that struck me: SKC’s goals looked like dunks - i.e., they forced the kinds of breakdowns that any good team can finish, they kept finding the right pass, etc.”

I pulled that comment from my MLS Week 7 review, specifically, the notes on Kansas City’s 3-2 win over Houston Dynamo FC because it gets to what has grown into a massive, which, here, means borderline pathological, pet peeve for me: for all their faults (hold that thought), SKC has been really good at pulling teams apart - as suggested by their (now) league-leading 17 goals scored. And I’d argue that’s how anyone concerned about Portland’s defense last night should apply that thought - i.e., wherever they looked ragged and panicked just remember they played a team that is good at that thing. Maybe I’ve danced around this point, maybe I’ve have tapped the proverbial sign about it, but, barring anything short of a ruthlessly effective system (e.g., Barcelona’s glory years), it’s…just weird to expect perfect control, composure and consistency from every player on [your team] in every game, especially when they play different teams with different players every week, players who have different strengths and weaknesses, and who do different things on and off the ball, and on and on and on. Every conversation about a team's success and failure should keep the quality of opposition as something as a main talking point. But I digress…or do I?

The other side of SKC is written into that final score against Houston - e.g., the two goals they gave up (and to Houston). They’ve given away goals all season. Differences in style notwithstanding (see the possession numbers), I’d go so far as to say they’re starting to resemble the Timbers in way both good and bad. A team that can’t keep out the opposition can only find success by out-scoring them; both Portland and Kansas City have the weapons to pull that off (player availability assumed), so this one boiled down to the question of who could pull it off on the night. Sure, Sporting pinned in Portland several times last night, but one Timber or another managed to get in the way (see the balance of blocked shots), whereas KC let Dairon Asprilla (get well!) have two cracks at scoring the opener. Portland’s defense wasn’t flawless - they got caught in one of their patented “can’t clear the danger” spin cycles in giving up the opening goal - but they held firmer over the full 90 than SKC and that was enough.

Sporting Kansas City 1-1 Austin FC: A Wee Scouting Report

Sure, use your disgusting hands...

Since I had time, and seeing that Sporting Kansas City is the Portland Timbers next opponent after the…international break, I watched SKC’s 1-1 home draw against Austin FC. I understand Austin doesn’t serve up an apples-to-apples comparison to Portland - also, have I mentioned how much it wads my undies when people talk about each game as if the home team plays the same team every week (because they don't)? - but I still wanted to see what I could see about how SKC approached the game, which players looked good, etc. Nothing deep, just some notes…

Sporting dominated the game, had most the possession, disrupted the hell out of Austin’s flow (except when they didn’t; wait for it), and so on, but Austin didn’t get a ton of great looks at Austin’s goal - and, when they did, the found Brad Stuver in the way (for example). He made nine saves (box score), some quite good, and I guess that’s my first note for Portland - or, more specifically, whoever starts in goal for them next Saturday: the 'keeper will have work to do. Whatever I thought of the approach (more later) and the general quality, SKC fired 32 shots, 11 of them on goal. They also showed a stress-inducing knack for holding the ball in the area once they got it in there (see note on Daniel Salloi below). That meant time in the area, and shots, but Austin cluttered the area pretty reliably. That’s what the note above on “great looks” points to: they defended with 7+ in the area and, from ~ the 40th minute on, Austin set the line of confrontation about 10 yards inside their own half.

With all that in front of them, SKC still forced home a goal - a smart put-back by Salloi, in fact - so they got something out of all that strum, drang, und running. Related thereto, Kansas City has given up the first goal in five of their nine games this season; they managed only the draw today, but, in four of those cases, they came back to win the game. That’s to say, don’t get cocky if/when The Former Wiz goes down a goal. Which brings me to a relevant digression…

I don’t think Portland will defend anywhere near as deep as Austin did - especially, not at home. I also don’t expect them to cede as much possession (they'll certainly hunt the ball more, or should), but I do expect the Timbers to take more chances in the attack: that’s all to say, I don’t expect Portland v SKC to either look or play-out like SKC v Austin. The latter plays a different style - Josh Wolff follows the Gregggg Berhalter dogma of playing out the back and likes to possess the ball, while I’d call Portland more opportunistic and creative. Which brings up the next point…