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| Always rooted for him too. |
You go through a soccer season, sorting out the players you can trust, developing a sense and/or set of beliefs about how far the local team can go, calibrating it from one week to the next by a combination of on-the-ground realities, personal biases, and outright daydreams. You get moments of clarity here and there, times when all those things come together and add up well enough…
…and then your local team has a night like tonight, a night that makes you feel either stupid or hubris-drunk depending how you read 120 minutes’ worth of tea leaves and a debacle of a penalty kick shootout. To finally pitch the headline, the Portland Timbers lost to New York City FC tonight, in Portland, and with the penalty kicks ending quickly enough to confirm an uneven night for the home side. You can play every game you get invited to, but you can’t win ‘em all…
How to describe that? Climbing a mountain, reaching the peak, then falling off the other side? Finally getting multi-ball, only to let all three-to-five balls slip away down both alleys and up the gut before you hit any of the jackpots? Having a tire go flat, discovering you have a spare and putting it on, only to realize you put the patches on wrong? Like playing euchre and having a solid hand when the bid ends in screw-the-dealer, only to get euchred by bad distribution? I’ll add other metaphors as they come to me, but it’s possible that’ll be the onlyone. two. three. four.
MLS Cup 2021 didn’t serve up a big corpse to dissect. There’s definitely a body on the slab - the Portland Timbers’ - but the time and cause of death seem straightforward enough. By my math, New York City FC looked the better, more (ruthlessly) organized team for…more or less, the first 80 minutes, then the Portland Timbers came too life with…yes, exactly enough time to spare, damn near down to the second, and they carried that momentum through the first half of extra-time. NYCFC got past the shock, regrouped over the second half of extra-time, and rallied to win their first major trophy on penalty kicks. And with breathing room. Hence the thing about falling off the other side of the mountain.
Sure, the Timbers got a couple bubbles under their butts from about the 25th minute only to have Valentin “Taty” Castellanos pop them when he broke wildly free at the back-post (didn’t I mention the back post?), to both nod home the opening goal and unsettle whatever game-plan the Timbers had run to that point…and that’s where I have questions.
The part of me that doesn’t want sin to be real starts with a theory that Giovanni Savarese lined up his team with two primary goals in mind to start the game: avoiding mistakes and taking notes of how NYCFC would approach it. The evidence supports that, so long as you drop things into the same narrative - e.g., Portland didn’t do much pressing over the first 20 minutes or so and they generally dropped back whenever NYCFC got hold of the ball. The New Yorkers got the first, best looks at goal - the little sky-blue shits had one in the first minute, dammit - and, once some form of the jitters wore off for both teams, they took hold of the game one pass at a time until somewhere around the 30th minute.
To continue the same narrative, after 30 minutes of forcing the ball into blind-alleys, kicking it out of bounds, and lumping hopeless clearances to either nowhere or nobody good, Timbers players started finding one another: what started as catch-what-catch-can, became touch-and-go, and slowly evolved into something resembling belief and competent passing. It seemed like they'd thawed out of their own doubt, or something, and, had things carried on in that vein for long enough, I’m confident one Timber or another would have scored. Eventually. Hell, for all I know I would have taken the same 90+ minutes it ultimately took for Felipe Mora to finally get the timing right and to hit the money shot on the pinball table…hold on, that’s another metaphor.
Now, the part of me that wants to rail against sin, to cast out loathsome demons and cure COVID 19 with one bless’d breath (buy me a lear-jet, amen) would argue a different tack, specifically, that the Timbers came out flat tonight - of all nights, tonight?! - and could only get the spare back on the wheel in before realizing the fucker was full of holes…hold on, last metaphor, swear to God.
In plainer, shorter words: it took the Timbers 30-35 minutes to get a hold of the game, only to have Taty Castellanos knock them back to square one. NYCFC’s go-ahead, brain-scrambling goal came off a free-kick caused by Claudio Bravo and a free header allowed…more or less by him, but, 1) why the hell would you have a young Dustin Hoffman (aka, Bravo) cover Castellanos, and 2) no matter how they set up, Bravo wasn’t the only guy nearby. I saw a lot of people crap on Steve Clark for letting in the goal - up to including the broadcast booth, and more later on that - but the vexing thing was the goal itself and how it spun the Timbers back into, literally, 50 more minutes of getting a hold of the game. Again.
Now feels like a good place to confess that I gave up around the...call it the 70th minute. Completely, all the way down to drafting a broadly similar, but pissier review of this game. I don’t know how many people pray in the Church of xG at this point, but the graph posted at the bottom of the stats portion of the Mothership’s match review gets most things right about both the game and xG as a metric. If you look at the line for each team in the (several, honestly) tens of minutes before each team scored their goal, you’ll see a visual of a snail crawling up a hill with a cat strapped to its back. Then - POW! - out of the blue, there’s a line going directly vertical, out of nowhere, and with a soccer ball/goal at the top of it. The point is, both team’s goals came out of nowhere. To make the same point from a higher angle, Portland and NYCFC (by one calculation) ended the whole damn 120 minutes on 1.2 and 0.9 xG, respectively. I don’t think I’ve ever seen MLS/ESPN hype a game quite like they did this one, but there’s no fluffing this into much.
As with more cup finals than most people want to admit, not a lot really happened in this game. It ebbed and flowed, if only in a way that people who know what to look for can see, but, if this final had a grand theme, it was the success of both defenses and midfields in making any kind of decent shot damned hard to come by - except the one Castellanos scored, of course. And, in the end, a tight game was all NYCFC needed to smuggle MLS Cup out of Providence Park. By that I mean, insofar as penalty kicks are a crap-shoot, I feel all right arguing that NYCFC had the hotter dice to roll. They managed the game better, looked better at their best than the Timbers ever did, and, though shook by Felipe Mora’s…just fucking awesome equalizer, NYCFC never got rattled. There’s a reason why I started with their defense, see the post below, but also don’t, not unless you want to check my work, because that shit’s well stale by now.
More than anything else, the Timbers never really figured out how to attack NYCFC. They had sporadic success, of course, but nothing sustained, nothing that ever looked much like a path to clear and convincing victory. After several weeks of looking assured against every team that lined up against them, the Timbers hit the field like a team trying to riff its way to victory, as if they could just make it up as they go. NYCFC had a plan tonight, the Timbers did not; and now NYCFC has MLS Cup.
Both though and because I don’t know what to add, I have loose plans of getting to a big picture wrap-up at some point, but, I can close tonight with just a handful of talking points. The first is biggest for me.
Steve Clark Did Not Lose This Game
A ‘keeper can fuck up in penalty kicks, and maybe Clark could have done better on a couple shots, but penalty kicks favor the kicker for one simple reason: they’re hard to stop. Guess right - as Sean Johnson did, twice - you build a reputation; Do the opposite, and you have people shitting on you all over twitter. All in all, Clark didn’t gamble any less than Johnson (as I read it), but he tried to game out the kicks, while Johnson just lunged where either his gut or his eye told him to, and his gambles paid off. Further, I left Clark out of my notes on Castellanos’ go-ahead goal precisely because I don’t think he was the biggest factor. His defense allowed free header from eight yards out on the latter and they could have avoided penalty kicks with a smarter and better game plan, or even just more vigorous execution of Plan A. The game ended in screw the dealer instead…crap, another damn metaphor, and, yeah, Clark played his cards wrong. But it was still screw the dealer - i.e., playing a hand the odds say you shouldn’t have been dealt.
To double down on the point, the Portland Timbers had all the advantages they needed going into this game - e.g., as full a roster as they’ve had all season, a bracing breeze of form at their backs, an adoring crowd behind them, and weather conditions that (allegedly) suited them - and they still let the game drift to penalties. Accepting the premise the Timbers are a good team - as I do - means accepting they turned in a turd on one of the biggest nights in team history…if with some honorable exceptions.
Too Few MVPS, Maybe Not the Right Ones
Diego Chara single-handedly stopped two clear chances on goal; after all these seasons, it’s simply mind-blowing he much he decides Portland’s fate on any given night. Larrys Mabiala punched out of defense, as if trying to keep NYCFC in front of the Timbers defense all on his own, and Dario Zuparic backed pretty damn well, and he/they largely succeeded. George Fochive did all right, but it’s (distinctly) possible the collective shape/posture improved after Cristhian Paredes came on just after the 60th minute. Sure, Bravo made his mistake(s), but neither he nor Juancarlos Van Rankin, the official punching bag of this site for 2021, felt like a real problem today. The Timbers only allowed the one goal between regular time and extra-time, after all…
On the other side, I thought Mora made a meal out of scraps tonight, a la Hamburger Helper, and I’d give Yimmi Chara credit for helping him make Portland’s better times happen, but I’d also argue the failure to figure out where or how to threaten NYCFC decided the game. I mean, I barely noticed Dairon Asprilla out there and Sebastian Blanco only got his foot to one or two of the straws he kicked at. And that last part sums it up better than anything else: Portland supplied good pressure any time they could get the ball close enough to Sean Johnson’s goal, but they couldn’t get it up there nearly often enough. If Ronny Delia sorted out how to stop Asprilla from getting out on the break, bravo. If NYCFC’s regular-ass press stymied the Timbers’ usual collective knack for getting from very little to quite a lot, again, full credit to the opposition. Because they really struggled with that shit; as such, is it any wonder?
Overall, yeah, it did suck to see any team but the Portland Timbers lift a trophy in Providence Park, and not just for the optics. I also can’t say New York City FC didn’t deserve it more. That said, this feels like neither the time nor a large enough sample size for raising the bigger questions about what happens to all concerned over the off-season, staff, players, owners, trust-fund babies…just the big, big picture. Speaking for myself, I’m going to spend the rest of the day mourning the better thing I never saw, but that felt so close only a day ago. Based on the circumstances, I really thought the Timbers had a better than even chance yesterday. The fact that more or less died from the second half to when Mora’s goal shocked it back to a brief, desperate life, gets the story right for me.
And if I had to sum up 2021, I’d go with, it all came together, until it came apart. Till the next explosion of drivel….
…and then your local team has a night like tonight, a night that makes you feel either stupid or hubris-drunk depending how you read 120 minutes’ worth of tea leaves and a debacle of a penalty kick shootout. To finally pitch the headline, the Portland Timbers lost to New York City FC tonight, in Portland, and with the penalty kicks ending quickly enough to confirm an uneven night for the home side. You can play every game you get invited to, but you can’t win ‘em all…
How to describe that? Climbing a mountain, reaching the peak, then falling off the other side? Finally getting multi-ball, only to let all three-to-five balls slip away down both alleys and up the gut before you hit any of the jackpots? Having a tire go flat, discovering you have a spare and putting it on, only to realize you put the patches on wrong? Like playing euchre and having a solid hand when the bid ends in screw-the-dealer, only to get euchred by bad distribution? I’ll add other metaphors as they come to me, but it’s possible that’ll be the only
MLS Cup 2021 didn’t serve up a big corpse to dissect. There’s definitely a body on the slab - the Portland Timbers’ - but the time and cause of death seem straightforward enough. By my math, New York City FC looked the better, more (ruthlessly) organized team for…more or less, the first 80 minutes, then the Portland Timbers came too life with…yes, exactly enough time to spare, damn near down to the second, and they carried that momentum through the first half of extra-time. NYCFC got past the shock, regrouped over the second half of extra-time, and rallied to win their first major trophy on penalty kicks. And with breathing room. Hence the thing about falling off the other side of the mountain.
Sure, the Timbers got a couple bubbles under their butts from about the 25th minute only to have Valentin “Taty” Castellanos pop them when he broke wildly free at the back-post (didn’t I mention the back post?), to both nod home the opening goal and unsettle whatever game-plan the Timbers had run to that point…and that’s where I have questions.
The part of me that doesn’t want sin to be real starts with a theory that Giovanni Savarese lined up his team with two primary goals in mind to start the game: avoiding mistakes and taking notes of how NYCFC would approach it. The evidence supports that, so long as you drop things into the same narrative - e.g., Portland didn’t do much pressing over the first 20 minutes or so and they generally dropped back whenever NYCFC got hold of the ball. The New Yorkers got the first, best looks at goal - the little sky-blue shits had one in the first minute, dammit - and, once some form of the jitters wore off for both teams, they took hold of the game one pass at a time until somewhere around the 30th minute.
To continue the same narrative, after 30 minutes of forcing the ball into blind-alleys, kicking it out of bounds, and lumping hopeless clearances to either nowhere or nobody good, Timbers players started finding one another: what started as catch-what-catch-can, became touch-and-go, and slowly evolved into something resembling belief and competent passing. It seemed like they'd thawed out of their own doubt, or something, and, had things carried on in that vein for long enough, I’m confident one Timber or another would have scored. Eventually. Hell, for all I know I would have taken the same 90+ minutes it ultimately took for Felipe Mora to finally get the timing right and to hit the money shot on the pinball table…hold on, that’s another metaphor.
Now, the part of me that wants to rail against sin, to cast out loathsome demons and cure COVID 19 with one bless’d breath (buy me a lear-jet, amen) would argue a different tack, specifically, that the Timbers came out flat tonight - of all nights, tonight?! - and could only get the spare back on the wheel in before realizing the fucker was full of holes…hold on, last metaphor, swear to God.
In plainer, shorter words: it took the Timbers 30-35 minutes to get a hold of the game, only to have Taty Castellanos knock them back to square one. NYCFC’s go-ahead, brain-scrambling goal came off a free-kick caused by Claudio Bravo and a free header allowed…more or less by him, but, 1) why the hell would you have a young Dustin Hoffman (aka, Bravo) cover Castellanos, and 2) no matter how they set up, Bravo wasn’t the only guy nearby. I saw a lot of people crap on Steve Clark for letting in the goal - up to including the broadcast booth, and more later on that - but the vexing thing was the goal itself and how it spun the Timbers back into, literally, 50 more minutes of getting a hold of the game. Again.
Now feels like a good place to confess that I gave up around the...call it the 70th minute. Completely, all the way down to drafting a broadly similar, but pissier review of this game. I don’t know how many people pray in the Church of xG at this point, but the graph posted at the bottom of the stats portion of the Mothership’s match review gets most things right about both the game and xG as a metric. If you look at the line for each team in the (several, honestly) tens of minutes before each team scored their goal, you’ll see a visual of a snail crawling up a hill with a cat strapped to its back. Then - POW! - out of the blue, there’s a line going directly vertical, out of nowhere, and with a soccer ball/goal at the top of it. The point is, both team’s goals came out of nowhere. To make the same point from a higher angle, Portland and NYCFC (by one calculation) ended the whole damn 120 minutes on 1.2 and 0.9 xG, respectively. I don’t think I’ve ever seen MLS/ESPN hype a game quite like they did this one, but there’s no fluffing this into much.
As with more cup finals than most people want to admit, not a lot really happened in this game. It ebbed and flowed, if only in a way that people who know what to look for can see, but, if this final had a grand theme, it was the success of both defenses and midfields in making any kind of decent shot damned hard to come by - except the one Castellanos scored, of course. And, in the end, a tight game was all NYCFC needed to smuggle MLS Cup out of Providence Park. By that I mean, insofar as penalty kicks are a crap-shoot, I feel all right arguing that NYCFC had the hotter dice to roll. They managed the game better, looked better at their best than the Timbers ever did, and, though shook by Felipe Mora’s…just fucking awesome equalizer, NYCFC never got rattled. There’s a reason why I started with their defense, see the post below, but also don’t, not unless you want to check my work, because that shit’s well stale by now.
More than anything else, the Timbers never really figured out how to attack NYCFC. They had sporadic success, of course, but nothing sustained, nothing that ever looked much like a path to clear and convincing victory. After several weeks of looking assured against every team that lined up against them, the Timbers hit the field like a team trying to riff its way to victory, as if they could just make it up as they go. NYCFC had a plan tonight, the Timbers did not; and now NYCFC has MLS Cup.
Both though and because I don’t know what to add, I have loose plans of getting to a big picture wrap-up at some point, but, I can close tonight with just a handful of talking points. The first is biggest for me.
Steve Clark Did Not Lose This Game
A ‘keeper can fuck up in penalty kicks, and maybe Clark could have done better on a couple shots, but penalty kicks favor the kicker for one simple reason: they’re hard to stop. Guess right - as Sean Johnson did, twice - you build a reputation; Do the opposite, and you have people shitting on you all over twitter. All in all, Clark didn’t gamble any less than Johnson (as I read it), but he tried to game out the kicks, while Johnson just lunged where either his gut or his eye told him to, and his gambles paid off. Further, I left Clark out of my notes on Castellanos’ go-ahead goal precisely because I don’t think he was the biggest factor. His defense allowed free header from eight yards out on the latter and they could have avoided penalty kicks with a smarter and better game plan, or even just more vigorous execution of Plan A. The game ended in screw the dealer instead…crap, another damn metaphor, and, yeah, Clark played his cards wrong. But it was still screw the dealer - i.e., playing a hand the odds say you shouldn’t have been dealt.
To double down on the point, the Portland Timbers had all the advantages they needed going into this game - e.g., as full a roster as they’ve had all season, a bracing breeze of form at their backs, an adoring crowd behind them, and weather conditions that (allegedly) suited them - and they still let the game drift to penalties. Accepting the premise the Timbers are a good team - as I do - means accepting they turned in a turd on one of the biggest nights in team history…if with some honorable exceptions.
Too Few MVPS, Maybe Not the Right Ones
Diego Chara single-handedly stopped two clear chances on goal; after all these seasons, it’s simply mind-blowing he much he decides Portland’s fate on any given night. Larrys Mabiala punched out of defense, as if trying to keep NYCFC in front of the Timbers defense all on his own, and Dario Zuparic backed pretty damn well, and he/they largely succeeded. George Fochive did all right, but it’s (distinctly) possible the collective shape/posture improved after Cristhian Paredes came on just after the 60th minute. Sure, Bravo made his mistake(s), but neither he nor Juancarlos Van Rankin, the official punching bag of this site for 2021, felt like a real problem today. The Timbers only allowed the one goal between regular time and extra-time, after all…
On the other side, I thought Mora made a meal out of scraps tonight, a la Hamburger Helper, and I’d give Yimmi Chara credit for helping him make Portland’s better times happen, but I’d also argue the failure to figure out where or how to threaten NYCFC decided the game. I mean, I barely noticed Dairon Asprilla out there and Sebastian Blanco only got his foot to one or two of the straws he kicked at. And that last part sums it up better than anything else: Portland supplied good pressure any time they could get the ball close enough to Sean Johnson’s goal, but they couldn’t get it up there nearly often enough. If Ronny Delia sorted out how to stop Asprilla from getting out on the break, bravo. If NYCFC’s regular-ass press stymied the Timbers’ usual collective knack for getting from very little to quite a lot, again, full credit to the opposition. Because they really struggled with that shit; as such, is it any wonder?
Overall, yeah, it did suck to see any team but the Portland Timbers lift a trophy in Providence Park, and not just for the optics. I also can’t say New York City FC didn’t deserve it more. That said, this feels like neither the time nor a large enough sample size for raising the bigger questions about what happens to all concerned over the off-season, staff, players, owners, trust-fund babies…just the big, big picture. Speaking for myself, I’m going to spend the rest of the day mourning the better thing I never saw, but that felt so close only a day ago. Based on the circumstances, I really thought the Timbers had a better than even chance yesterday. The fact that more or less died from the second half to when Mora’s goal shocked it back to a brief, desperate life, gets the story right for me.
And if I had to sum up 2021, I’d go with, it all came together, until it came apart. Till the next explosion of drivel….
Your 70th minute feelings? Pretty much mine. My late game impulse to just let the DVR save the final sh!tshow moments for later was very strong. But a fan's need to not miss out on epic misery was stronger. And so, the 94th minute I watched live in all its spit-take glory.
ReplyDeleteI'm in the camp of- The Timbers, especially in midfield, just couldn't pass accurately to each other. Endless attempts to mount an attack were to end in turnover as every lazy or inaccurate or hopeful mid-pitch pass went like a magnet to the Man City reservists. Nerves or reversion to the mean? I dunno.
In my non-MVP category, Fochive topped the list. Mentally a step behind; physically off the pace, and attitude-wise always ready to pass backward instead of taking NYCFC on. And Asprilla is evidently not Mr. December.
To get to the final, we were a total high wire act. And all credit to these Timbers for making that work.
The local postmortem coverage has given me the feeling of an exciting effort expended which came up short in soccer's equivalent of multiple coin tosses at the end. The tweeters all have expressed the feeling that, overall, that experience was wonderful and needs repeating. Unfortunately, a MLS Cup match here again faces very, very long odds for all kinds of competitive and league structure reasons. But, hey, that's life.
yeah, the choice to throw Fochive into the fire, while understandable, might have hurt the collective rhythm; for what it's worth, I don't think Zambrano would have offered a better option.
ReplyDeleteThis season was definitely better than I expected (Forza Team Half-Empty!), but between Paredes progress this season and knowing (hoping? believing?) Eryk will come back next season leaves me feeling better about the future today than I did going into the 2021 season. Time will tell. Thanks, as always for reading/commenting!
Hey, Jeff- de nada.
ReplyDeleteAnd hey, please continue to key in what you're thinking. We need your analysis, man! (quoting The Dude as a Timbers fan.)