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| I feel good, I do...just keep the damn thing on, for now. |
What lies all but inertly for long stretches of time, only to come to and get to business?
The answer could be Jaroslaw Niezgoda or, in this game and, best case, the season, the Portland Timbers. It could be both, it could be neither: that’s my way of signaling I won’t even start getting ahead of myself.
After slipping down to somewhere between doomed and rock-bottom, the theretofore irrelevant Portland Timbers nabbed two straight brass rings on their way to a 2-2 draw on the road at Nashville SC on the back of (yet) a(nother) brace from the theretofore irrelevant Jaroslaw Niezgoda, at which point you have to ask yourself, is it all just a metaphor waiting for the big director in the sky box to whisper...action?
Again, good sense and more than a few visuals from tonight make a strong case for walking along the bandwagon to see what happens before you run ahead of it shouting promises of beer, wine and trophies. Best not say reckless things, and so on. If only the next word were “but.”
Leaving points on the table has become a house specialty for Nashville, for one, even against lower-rated teams that the Timbers. While I’d argue they never looked dominant tonight (confident might even be a stretch), you could feel the nerves of both team and city rattling the second a pair of their errors gifted Niezgoda the penalty kick. Penalty kicks being what they are – which Dairon Asprilla did his bit to sign, seal and deliver the Timbers to within one goal of one point – those two moments could have served as a wake-up call to Nashville or a rallying flag to the Timbers.
Fortunately for the visitors, momentum had already tilted Portland’s way courtesy of Eryk Williamson coming on for the valiant, sometimes-limited, yet clearly kaput, Yimmi Chara. [Ed. - I’ll defend him as a player (though probably not a DP...and is he still?) more than most; if they held a Utility Player of the Year Award and they gave me a vote, Yimmi would get mine, but I digress.] I also doubt any Timbers fan would seriously argue that Portland didn’t have a better second half. I’ll get to that, and Eryk’s role in it, but a word about the first half first.
I’d call the Timbers’ starting XI gently-experimental at most. With Diego Chara out, Gio Savarese gave David Ayala a rare start and partnered him with Leg-Drunk Yimmi; that was probably the biggest gamble. Having Bill Tuiloma suspended limited options in defense, but a Larrys Mabiala/Zac McGraw CB pairing doesn’t risk a ton more and Gio had his regular fullbacks (and all that means). And, with Yimmi pulled back, he plugged Dairon Asprilla into the space he typically occupies. The rest of the attack looked familiar and, if I’m blunt, not in a welcoming way...
...and, as much as I don’t want to overplay this, I still feel the need to push the point.
“Imagination of a phone book, execution of an elementary school play.”
I had enough time to write that into my in-game notes, by hand, mostly because there wasn’t much else to do. The Timbers went down early – inside the 20th minute, in fact – when Nashville’s Sean Davis (not famous for scoring, btw) fired a pretty go-ahead goal from range. The sum of the sequence added up to something fortunate for Nashville, but I’ve seen players left open in that spot dozens of times – Portland players, in fact – and nothing come of it. So, credit to Davis, but Nashville doesn’t get that look without sleepy defending by Portland, and from the moment the ball crossed the center stripe. It didn’t help when Nashville doubled the lead, even if it was neither surprising nor undeserved: an in/out/cross goal is only disgraceful to the team that allows it, and the Timbers were late all over, even if the broadcast booth talked up what Hany Mukhtar’s movement did to Zac McGraw. (Based on what I saw; McGraw cheated forward, the ball rolled behind him, giving Mukhtar more time to act).
Those two goals aside, not a whole lot separated the two teams, not by the time that second goal went in, and certainly not during the first half. And here’s where I pick up that note from my notes:
For all that Nashville didn’t look like anything special out there tonight, the Timbers showed pretty much every side of their much-/rightly-maligned 2022 normal for sixty the opening 60 minutes. As I’ve ranted before, the Timbers defense has its faults, but the Timbers' attack has been theirs – i.e., too often, they play as if a team gets some kind of prize for getting the ball into the attacking third. From there, it’s nothing more than ugly meets incoherent and whatever bastard offspring that follows from. If someone has commented on the Timbers in 2022, this has absolutely come up, and gods know I’ve fumbled for words to describe it as if fumbling in solidarity, but, if you’ll indulge me, just once more.
The answer could be Jaroslaw Niezgoda or, in this game and, best case, the season, the Portland Timbers. It could be both, it could be neither: that’s my way of signaling I won’t even start getting ahead of myself.
After slipping down to somewhere between doomed and rock-bottom, the theretofore irrelevant Portland Timbers nabbed two straight brass rings on their way to a 2-2 draw on the road at Nashville SC on the back of (yet) a(nother) brace from the theretofore irrelevant Jaroslaw Niezgoda, at which point you have to ask yourself, is it all just a metaphor waiting for the big director in the sky box to whisper...action?
Again, good sense and more than a few visuals from tonight make a strong case for walking along the bandwagon to see what happens before you run ahead of it shouting promises of beer, wine and trophies. Best not say reckless things, and so on. If only the next word were “but.”
Leaving points on the table has become a house specialty for Nashville, for one, even against lower-rated teams that the Timbers. While I’d argue they never looked dominant tonight (confident might even be a stretch), you could feel the nerves of both team and city rattling the second a pair of their errors gifted Niezgoda the penalty kick. Penalty kicks being what they are – which Dairon Asprilla did his bit to sign, seal and deliver the Timbers to within one goal of one point – those two moments could have served as a wake-up call to Nashville or a rallying flag to the Timbers.
Fortunately for the visitors, momentum had already tilted Portland’s way courtesy of Eryk Williamson coming on for the valiant, sometimes-limited, yet clearly kaput, Yimmi Chara. [Ed. - I’ll defend him as a player (though probably not a DP...and is he still?) more than most; if they held a Utility Player of the Year Award and they gave me a vote, Yimmi would get mine, but I digress.] I also doubt any Timbers fan would seriously argue that Portland didn’t have a better second half. I’ll get to that, and Eryk’s role in it, but a word about the first half first.
I’d call the Timbers’ starting XI gently-experimental at most. With Diego Chara out, Gio Savarese gave David Ayala a rare start and partnered him with Leg-Drunk Yimmi; that was probably the biggest gamble. Having Bill Tuiloma suspended limited options in defense, but a Larrys Mabiala/Zac McGraw CB pairing doesn’t risk a ton more and Gio had his regular fullbacks (and all that means). And, with Yimmi pulled back, he plugged Dairon Asprilla into the space he typically occupies. The rest of the attack looked familiar and, if I’m blunt, not in a welcoming way...
...and, as much as I don’t want to overplay this, I still feel the need to push the point.
“Imagination of a phone book, execution of an elementary school play.”
I had enough time to write that into my in-game notes, by hand, mostly because there wasn’t much else to do. The Timbers went down early – inside the 20th minute, in fact – when Nashville’s Sean Davis (not famous for scoring, btw) fired a pretty go-ahead goal from range. The sum of the sequence added up to something fortunate for Nashville, but I’ve seen players left open in that spot dozens of times – Portland players, in fact – and nothing come of it. So, credit to Davis, but Nashville doesn’t get that look without sleepy defending by Portland, and from the moment the ball crossed the center stripe. It didn’t help when Nashville doubled the lead, even if it was neither surprising nor undeserved: an in/out/cross goal is only disgraceful to the team that allows it, and the Timbers were late all over, even if the broadcast booth talked up what Hany Mukhtar’s movement did to Zac McGraw. (Based on what I saw; McGraw cheated forward, the ball rolled behind him, giving Mukhtar more time to act).
Those two goals aside, not a whole lot separated the two teams, not by the time that second goal went in, and certainly not during the first half. And here’s where I pick up that note from my notes:
For all that Nashville didn’t look like anything special out there tonight, the Timbers showed pretty much every side of their much-/rightly-maligned 2022 normal for sixty the opening 60 minutes. As I’ve ranted before, the Timbers defense has its faults, but the Timbers' attack has been theirs – i.e., too often, they play as if a team gets some kind of prize for getting the ball into the attacking third. From there, it’s nothing more than ugly meets incoherent and whatever bastard offspring that follows from. If someone has commented on the Timbers in 2022, this has absolutely come up, and gods know I’ve fumbled for words to describe it as if fumbling in solidarity, but, if you’ll indulge me, just once more.
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| Vibe. |
I think I’ve put it down to the movement off the ball before, but...it’s the movement off the ball, the lack thereof, too many players checking back to the ball, both visually and physically, one player trying to find space for a shot, only without any other players taking note of the movement: put it all together and you have an issue of players both doing and not doing things with zero reference to the other attacking players. My first thought is that Gio tells all of them to take a position and try make things happen, so they do and all at once. And, for the thousandth time, what’s the point of playing it wide when if the players in the middle don’t react to that change? In fewer words, I think the approach play is fine; the problem comes with the fact that the rest looks like an improv troupe operating without a prompt. And I write that as someone who believes a good team doesn’t need prompts, not so long as each pays attention to what the other is doing...and now we’re gonna back up a bit.
The Timbers could have got back into this one earlier. I believe that, and base it on a sense that Nashville left an uncharacteristic number of gaps in front of their back four (a factor of starting in a 4-4-2, perhaps?), spaces I saw a number of Timbers players take throughout the game, and with space around them and an enticing number/spread of players in front of them. If only even one of the Timbers who saw that pass played it. Because the ball never came in, Nashville’s defenders never had to make hard decisions, shots on goal never happened, which meant goals died before they could twinkle in God’s eye; there's a kids' book that works that pattern, but I'm a dozen years out of reading to my kids, so that's not coming up, forgive me. At any rate, I tweeted this before Nashville’s first goal:
“Given what Nashville has looked like so far (gappy), I’d like to see Timbers players take more chances, even if just with their passing. Chara had a lot of space on that last attack. Take the invitation, y’all.”
Those passes did, however, start happening after Eryk came on. They didn’t always work, never mind come off, but, again, Nashville’s anxiety about letting another two points slip away grew palpable to anyone who knows their 2022 home narrative during the fusillade that followed the penalty kick. Williamson had the confidence and (so, so) proverbial “sense of urgency” to make the passes and that, 1) changed the game, and 2) arguably (and I’m arguing a loud yes), led to the pass that led to Niezgoda’s decisive equalizer. He did it by making the pass that might change the game instead of the pass that keeps the ball. The decisive, equalizing goal didn’t precisely follow from that – based on my refresher, it followed from Portland’s the usual egg from golden goose, e.g., transition – but I still like to think the Timbers improved generally by about as much as Williamson helped them. Y'know, for optimism.
I’ll close with the relevant individual achievement awards, but, to wrap up the collective effort, no, this was not a result any team would point to as a “how-to” manual for success. It was, however, an example of both sides of the Portland Timbers doing just enough to meet one another in the middle. It was good enough to land them not just seven points of nine over three match days (woot-woot!), but a good scent of the pack in front of them. As much as it sucks that the 5th-7th place teams have games in hand on them (two for Seattle and Dallas, three for the Galaxy), with 23 points in their pockets, the Timbers find themselves in a decent place to catch any of the five teams above them if/when they stumble...six, if you count Nashville’s stumble tonight among them.
That’s it for the narrative. Time for Individual Achievement Awards!
David Bingham(/Aljaz Ivacic): I’m somewhat notorious for this line of thinking, but a good defense makes a competent ‘keeper good enough.
Larrys Mabiala: Dominant in the air, and thank God for it.
David Ayala: Sometimes being very [____]-left footed is a curse. Despite an overall anonymo-meh game, he found good spots to spray the ball around. He’s better hitting the ball from right to left, but he needs to work on becoming multi-directional.
Santiago Moreno: No Timber found the space between Nashville’s defense in midfield reliably as Moreno and he usually did good stuff with it. I liked where he played and think he did too. I'm finally coming around...
Dairon Asprilla: Seeing glimpses of 2021 Dairon, the energy, desire and brawn that gives teams something else to think about.
There’s not much to praise from there, sadly, but even with Sebastian Blanco struggling to find the game, the Timbers did the one big thing that gets a team in the MLS playoffs – i.e., win the games a competitive team should. Here, that means any team struggling, wherever, and for whatever reason. Luckier than pretty, sure, but taking advantage of Nashville’s angst meant one point for Portland and two less for them. And it’s all about the math...
The Timbers could have got back into this one earlier. I believe that, and base it on a sense that Nashville left an uncharacteristic number of gaps in front of their back four (a factor of starting in a 4-4-2, perhaps?), spaces I saw a number of Timbers players take throughout the game, and with space around them and an enticing number/spread of players in front of them. If only even one of the Timbers who saw that pass played it. Because the ball never came in, Nashville’s defenders never had to make hard decisions, shots on goal never happened, which meant goals died before they could twinkle in God’s eye; there's a kids' book that works that pattern, but I'm a dozen years out of reading to my kids, so that's not coming up, forgive me. At any rate, I tweeted this before Nashville’s first goal:
“Given what Nashville has looked like so far (gappy), I’d like to see Timbers players take more chances, even if just with their passing. Chara had a lot of space on that last attack. Take the invitation, y’all.”
Those passes did, however, start happening after Eryk came on. They didn’t always work, never mind come off, but, again, Nashville’s anxiety about letting another two points slip away grew palpable to anyone who knows their 2022 home narrative during the fusillade that followed the penalty kick. Williamson had the confidence and (so, so) proverbial “sense of urgency” to make the passes and that, 1) changed the game, and 2) arguably (and I’m arguing a loud yes), led to the pass that led to Niezgoda’s decisive equalizer. He did it by making the pass that might change the game instead of the pass that keeps the ball. The decisive, equalizing goal didn’t precisely follow from that – based on my refresher, it followed from Portland’s the usual egg from golden goose, e.g., transition – but I still like to think the Timbers improved generally by about as much as Williamson helped them. Y'know, for optimism.
I’ll close with the relevant individual achievement awards, but, to wrap up the collective effort, no, this was not a result any team would point to as a “how-to” manual for success. It was, however, an example of both sides of the Portland Timbers doing just enough to meet one another in the middle. It was good enough to land them not just seven points of nine over three match days (woot-woot!), but a good scent of the pack in front of them. As much as it sucks that the 5th-7th place teams have games in hand on them (two for Seattle and Dallas, three for the Galaxy), with 23 points in their pockets, the Timbers find themselves in a decent place to catch any of the five teams above them if/when they stumble...six, if you count Nashville’s stumble tonight among them.
That’s it for the narrative. Time for Individual Achievement Awards!
David Bingham(/Aljaz Ivacic): I’m somewhat notorious for this line of thinking, but a good defense makes a competent ‘keeper good enough.
Larrys Mabiala: Dominant in the air, and thank God for it.
David Ayala: Sometimes being very [____]-left footed is a curse. Despite an overall anonymo-meh game, he found good spots to spray the ball around. He’s better hitting the ball from right to left, but he needs to work on becoming multi-directional.
Santiago Moreno: No Timber found the space between Nashville’s defense in midfield reliably as Moreno and he usually did good stuff with it. I liked where he played and think he did too. I'm finally coming around...
Dairon Asprilla: Seeing glimpses of 2021 Dairon, the energy, desire and brawn that gives teams something else to think about.
There’s not much to praise from there, sadly, but even with Sebastian Blanco struggling to find the game, the Timbers did the one big thing that gets a team in the MLS playoffs – i.e., win the games a competitive team should. Here, that means any team struggling, wherever, and for whatever reason. Luckier than pretty, sure, but taking advantage of Nashville’s angst meant one point for Portland and two less for them. And it’s all about the math...
Good report as always. Williamson made the pass to a moving Niezgoda who was already facing goal. That's a recipe for (Niezgoda) success. Post-knee recovery, that's our striker's strength - not poaching in the scrum in front of the keeper.
ReplyDeleteDuring peak Valeri, Diego was always trying to anticipate our attackers' movement with passes like Williamson was attempting. You need confidence in yourself; eighty percent of the time the pass won't come off for a variety of reasons. You have to believe in the concept and in your skills.