Portland Timbers 2-1 Seattle Sounders: Think Happy Thoughts. And That's Mostly Directed at Me

The beeesssttt of both worlds...

The super-big, important thing to keep in mind – and I type those silly words with only a few trifling complaints about tonight in my head – the Seattle Sounders have been as bad as the Portland Timbers lately; worse (for them), they completely pissed away the first 40 minutes of the second half through not knowing what to do and fucking up pretty much everything they attempted. It was the opposite of impressive.

And yet, I am thankful because the Timbers needed tonight’s 2-1 win like a fish needs water and a mammal needs fresh air to fill its lungs. It’s mostly happy stuff from here on out, and I may be speaking for myself here, but I would be very, very cautious about reading a turn-around to a fitful 2022 season into this game. That’s to say, one can can’t talk about how iffy a team has been going into a game only to talk around it when said iffy team spends...let’s see, call it the 20th minute that Seattle started doing nothing, and I’d say that carried to the 80th minute, maybe the 75th at the earliest, so, yeah, by my count, the Sounders checked out for somewhere between 55 and 60 minutes of the game. All I’m saying is I wouldn’t count on any other teams to do that.

But full credit to the Timbers. They had their own period of figuring out which way is up (pssst...it’s up), they even went down a goal on a set-piece that said “HELLO” like a whiff of cat-piss (speaking from experience), but Portland did something tonight that they haven’t done since...I’m going by memory here, but I’d say either the home win over the San Jose Earthquakes or battling road draw at Minnesota United FC – i.e., make the game play out on their terms. Most of that, if not all of it, turned on the defining fundamental in all sports: the art of execution. And, as I often do, I must confess to heresy as an auto-da-fe.

All the way up to the exact second Eryk Williamson ran into Yeimar Gomez Andrade’s legs (and blow it out yer ass, Kasey Keller), I couldn’t see a path to the Timbers first goal. A very large part of that actually went back to Williamson, a player who, at least tonight showed a lack of mobility that I’ve not seen since OG MLS-legend, Carlos Valderrama. God’s honest, I watched Eryk all night and the man barely moved. With the game winding down and everything (which, here, means another fucking draw) on the table, I saw Williamson occupy a space in the channel two-three yards above the top of the 18...and that’s it. He literally stood there and directed traffic. The ball came in and out of that space a couple times, Eryk stepped vaguely toward, but, again, that’s it.

With the win, I couldn’t give less of a shit about that. Despite the several times I either lost track of where he was or forgot he was even on the field, Williamson made the play that got the Timbers back on their feet (and nice PK to Dairon Asprilla, and full credit for doing decisive things when called upon). Who knows? If he’s reserving his energy for those moments and no harm comes of it, who am I to judge?

While I hadn’t entirely given over to despair in the 33 minutes that passed between Seattle's goal and Portland’s – i.e., there’s always the second half and Gio Savarese’s halftime speech or a locker-room-wide round of poppers to salvage these things – it looked like so much more of the same in the attack (aka, chipping to one dude in the box and hoping he gets close enough to smell it) that giving up/in made good sense. And, for anyone wanting something to feel uncomplicatedly good about, consider this timeline: it took the Timbers about 21 minutes to (at long last) discombobulate Seattle’s low-block, but, once it took, it stuck. Seatle came ass-puckering close to replicating their opening goal somewhere late in the game - here, I’m thinking about Justin Ragen’s header off Ivacic’s to-that-point-largely-unmolested goal – but that may very well have been...hold on, just checked the box score, can confirm it was and it turns out that was, Seattle’s best chance (their only other shot on goal was Nouhou Tolo’s soft AF back-post header)...and, yes, it still breaks my brain that a shot off the crossbar or either post doesn’t count as a “shot on goal,” because it literally hits the fucking goal. But I digress...

There was a certain poetry in Sebastian Blanco answering Seattle’s early go-ahead goal by slamming home Portland’s winner off a set-piece – and, to return to a theme, Kelyn Rowe fell the fuck apart for Seattle tonight – but I sincerely find that secondary to the thing that made me feel most good, warm and fuzzy: Portland actively controlled most of this game. If the game-state for this game applied for in-state tuition in the state of Oregon, who had cause to blink an eye?

And yet things have not changed, not really.

Ideally, readers will divine a time-line in the above (I consciously used a lot of numbers, fwiw). But I still feel obliged to pass on one more caveat. On the very real plus side – given the context, especially – the Timbers are above the playoff line and with a two-point cushion over every team below it. On the down side, Portland is one of literally only two teams to have played 28 games as of tonight (FC Dallas is the other one; a good thing, btw). 10 teams across MLS will catch up by the end of the weekend – and at least two that matter in the Western Conference (Nashville SC and the Vancouver Whitecaps (who, it bears noting, did not win the Cascadia Cup)) – but there are several teams that have a fair opportunity to overtake Portland on points over 28 games, plus one team (the Los Angeles Galaxy) who will get three bites at doing so, and with only two points to make up. In other words, there’s no denying that the Timbers remain in thick of the Western Conference’s mid-table scrum, necks locked and pushing against blokes just as big.

That’s to say, this was a good and necessary step, but there’s still very much work to do. Now, some talking points, one player at a time:

1) Zac McGraw
Won’t lie, he lost too many one-v-one duels against Jordan Morris for comfort (and gods bless Bill Tuiloma for covering the run on one early in the second half), but he also won damn near everything about five feet in Portland’s area and, bluntly, he didn’t make the kinds of wild, stabbing plays that have burned Larrys Mabiala since round-about the start of July. He’s a different player, obviously, and that just asks questions about how the Timbers want to play defense down the stretch.

2) Is the Three-Man Backline the (an) Answer?
I still like the concept, but, in keeping with an early theme, I’m not about to call it a success based on tonight’s result. Also...

2a) Santiago Moreno Is Not a Good Wingback (Yet)
He got burned at least three times tonight in a way that should make Josecarlos Van Rankin feel like he’s punching even, at least defensively, and that absolutely feels like an issue, but...and relatedly/obliquely...

3) Diego Chara Made This Happen
As noted in the game thread – and about 40 minutes too late – Chara put this game on his back, and on both sides of the ball. When the Timbers needed cover at the back, he answered; when they needed someone to unbalance the Sounders defense, he stepped up, running into space wherever the Sounders left it open. To tie Moreno back into this thing, I’d rate him as the only other besides Diego Chara who had a good game up until the Williamson/Asprilla equalizer. Those two players, along with the Timbers back three, carried the team tonight, but Diego Chara ran the first, and decisive, leg.

4) Understanding Yimmi
For all his faults and however short he falls of living up to his DP status, Yimmi’s contribution to the Timbers is his energy. Week in, week out, the man is omnipresent and he covers an incredible amount of ground. You can quibble about what he does with all that running, and even question the wisdom of keeping him as a DP (lord knows I have), but all that running is the most underrated contribution that any player makes to this team.

That’s all I’ve got for this one. Feel free to drop in arguments, theories or questions in the comments, or on twitter. I’ll answer the questions, like the comments, and do what I can to address the arguments. Overall, though, I’m calling this a good and important win and I’m happy with the way it happened. Till the next one...which, for the record, is about to blow up a recent editorial decision, God damn it.