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| Every Timber, and all Timbers. |
Let’s start here:
“I mean, I don’t want to overplay the possibility Portland will be ‘the next Charlotte,’ but I don’t want to ignore it either.”
I pulled that from my MLS Week 4 preview and, while I don’t tell the future often, I would have won the lottery with a call that precise in 90% of your state lotteries. If soccer has a spin on getting kicked in the balls hard and true, it’s giving up anything north of four goals. And yet I want to pause here to present a couple arguments...hold on, before I get on the upcoming roll, the Portland Timbers got rolled like...16 drunks (that’s starters plus five subs) tonight in and by Atlanta tonight, losing 1-5 to a team that’s starting to look somewhere between plausible and serious. And, yes, as confirmed by the stats, the Timbers could have lost by a couple more on a worse day.
Back to the arguments...
I don’t blame the defense for this one. It was at least three-times removed from perfect – see the collective bumble that let Atlanta’s Caleb Wiley slip through for a long-range tap-in for their first, or the field-wide absence of anything helpful to stop Giorgos Giakoumakis from breaking his duck, and all over Portland’s defense (....and where the hell does “breaking his duck” come from and why such a dirty phrase?). Giakoumakis' goal put the game to 1-3 against Portland, but things looked lost the second Thiago Almada – from Atlanta, obviously, because how could Portland have an MVP in a 1-5 loss? – thumped in a Georgia peach of a free-kick from....where do you reckon, Zeke? 28 yards? 30? I’m trying to cut back on linking in posts. Not just on the suspicion that no one hits any of the links, but because you’re all adults and you know how to find what you like...but Almada’s free kick is worth linking to, seriously.
After that, sure, you can fault Larrys Mabiala for getting bumped off the play by a player (Almada) about two-thirds his side and I’m just as sure someone out there has things to say about how Luiz Araujo got around Justin Rasmussen, but those were the fifth and fourth goals of the game, respectively (I listed those two in order of egregiousness), and, as noted above, if there’s a team “this fucker was over once Atlanta scored three” club, I hereby sign on as Treasurer.
I say that because, as much as the defense fucked up, they had absolutely no help, none, from any other portion of the field. You can cite any number you like – 75%, for instance, the number on the official stats page (with 58.9% in the attacking half, and 53.1% in the final third) – and I’ll call bullshit on it because, outside incidents isolated to the point of misanthropy, the Timbers attack utterly failed to show. And the defense, for all its faults, carried the weight of that failure from the 20th minute to the bitter end.
One of the key points that follows therefrom has to be driven home: for all the players that Portland has missing, very few come on the strictly defensive side of the team. I mean, sure, Cristhian Paredes has a defensive role and David Ayala was drafted as...I think, a passing No. 6, but neither of those players have played a decisive role in Portland’s defensive set-up...I think the word is ever. My point is, the defense the Timbers have right now is the defense they’ve got until they sign someone new.
And, here, I can’t help but think of shipping Bill Tuiloma to Charlotte FC, price be damned. Going the other way, do you think any other team in the league and/or world would have offered you value for, say, Larrys Mabiala? I suppose I bring that up to underscore the argument that Portland’s defense may be the best it can be right now. I mean, if you there's no fix on the horizon, what else is there to say? So let’s get back to shitting on the offense.
“I mean, I don’t want to overplay the possibility Portland will be ‘the next Charlotte,’ but I don’t want to ignore it either.”
I pulled that from my MLS Week 4 preview and, while I don’t tell the future often, I would have won the lottery with a call that precise in 90% of your state lotteries. If soccer has a spin on getting kicked in the balls hard and true, it’s giving up anything north of four goals. And yet I want to pause here to present a couple arguments...hold on, before I get on the upcoming roll, the Portland Timbers got rolled like...16 drunks (that’s starters plus five subs) tonight in and by Atlanta tonight, losing 1-5 to a team that’s starting to look somewhere between plausible and serious. And, yes, as confirmed by the stats, the Timbers could have lost by a couple more on a worse day.
Back to the arguments...
I don’t blame the defense for this one. It was at least three-times removed from perfect – see the collective bumble that let Atlanta’s Caleb Wiley slip through for a long-range tap-in for their first, or the field-wide absence of anything helpful to stop Giorgos Giakoumakis from breaking his duck, and all over Portland’s defense (....and where the hell does “breaking his duck” come from and why such a dirty phrase?). Giakoumakis' goal put the game to 1-3 against Portland, but things looked lost the second Thiago Almada – from Atlanta, obviously, because how could Portland have an MVP in a 1-5 loss? – thumped in a Georgia peach of a free-kick from....where do you reckon, Zeke? 28 yards? 30? I’m trying to cut back on linking in posts. Not just on the suspicion that no one hits any of the links, but because you’re all adults and you know how to find what you like...but Almada’s free kick is worth linking to, seriously.
After that, sure, you can fault Larrys Mabiala for getting bumped off the play by a player (Almada) about two-thirds his side and I’m just as sure someone out there has things to say about how Luiz Araujo got around Justin Rasmussen, but those were the fifth and fourth goals of the game, respectively (I listed those two in order of egregiousness), and, as noted above, if there’s a team “this fucker was over once Atlanta scored three” club, I hereby sign on as Treasurer.
I say that because, as much as the defense fucked up, they had absolutely no help, none, from any other portion of the field. You can cite any number you like – 75%, for instance, the number on the official stats page (with 58.9% in the attacking half, and 53.1% in the final third) – and I’ll call bullshit on it because, outside incidents isolated to the point of misanthropy, the Timbers attack utterly failed to show. And the defense, for all its faults, carried the weight of that failure from the 20th minute to the bitter end.
One of the key points that follows therefrom has to be driven home: for all the players that Portland has missing, very few come on the strictly defensive side of the team. I mean, sure, Cristhian Paredes has a defensive role and David Ayala was drafted as...I think, a passing No. 6, but neither of those players have played a decisive role in Portland’s defensive set-up...I think the word is ever. My point is, the defense the Timbers have right now is the defense they’ve got until they sign someone new.
And, here, I can’t help but think of shipping Bill Tuiloma to Charlotte FC, price be damned. Going the other way, do you think any other team in the league and/or world would have offered you value for, say, Larrys Mabiala? I suppose I bring that up to underscore the argument that Portland’s defense may be the best it can be right now. I mean, if you there's no fix on the horizon, what else is there to say? So let’s get back to shitting on the offense.
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| My relationship to the team right now. Also, still strong... |
I’d call my second key point the beating heart of the problem. Yeah, yeah, the injuries. I understand how much talent Portland has on ice (as much as I question the reality of that talent), but, here’s the swarm of bees bouncing around my bonnet: even absent all those starters, new and old, the Timbers’ attack shouldn’t look so fucking aimless and useless. Sure and, hallelujah, Tega Ikoba nodded home a header that sat Atlanta’s Brad Guzan on his ass, but that also happened between Atlanta’s fourth and fifth goal – i.e., too many minutes and goals too late. And that’s neat and all, but I logged the Timbers first, legit attacking move at the 65th minute when Juan David Mosquera did some great work up Portland’s right, he passed the ball into Nathan Fogaca...and who pelted his one-timber into night sky. At least the ball had fun, right? (I'm flyin', pa! I'm flyin'!) To circle back to a word, “legit,” Eryk Williamson sliced a shot home in the second minute, only to see it called offside due to some lurking by Jaroslaw Niezgoda.
Going the other way, do you think that would have changed the game?
I can count the good things the Timbers did in the attack on one hand, and probably before having resolve the eternal question of whether a thumb is a finger (it is not). That gets back to the two above adjectives, “aimless” and “useless.” I get that the quality of the starting players matters, but when a team fails on the field, shouldn’t it look more like a failure in execution instead of a failure in concept and/or planning? In other words, in a world where lesser players attempt to execute the same plays, you’d expect to see the same kinds of movement and runs, only with the passes under-hit, overcooked, or somehow otherwise incomplete...but, with Portland, you don’t. In fact, you don’t see much movement at all. At this point, I’m not sure what you see in the attack.
What’s even funnier – if for those with a darker sense of humor – is how I’d characterize what I saw with the Timbers’ defense tonight. First up, I thought Gio Savarese arranged the defensive posture in an interesting and debatable way. I saw what I’d call a mid-block – which, for me, means condensing the vertical space and fighting for the ball across what I’d call 20 yards on either side of the center-stripe (is that right?)) – and that kept the Timbers stable for as long as it lasted. Once that broke down, however – i.e., sometime passed Wiley’s opening goal – the Timbers adopted a different tactic – notably, one that mirrors what they do and/or don’t on offense.
The phrase I came up with to describe it was present staring. In practice, that amounts to every Timbers players taking a defensive positions somewhere between 3-4 yards away from the attacking player closest to them...and just staring at them, i.e., an act of being there and nothing more. They don't go after the ball, the players near the other players don't get tighter, they just got close and...watched them. In between the times Atlanta pulled them elbow from asshole – which, to float an opinion, happened more than you’d think based on Atlanta’s total shots – the Timbers just kind of...I guess the word is organized to gently confront anything and everything Atlanta attempted to do? In fewer words, I guess this is what you’d expect to see if your coach instructed you to keep shape above all else...and how’d that go?
If anyone came to this expecting more of a blow-by-blow, all I can say is 1) this game didn’t really deserve one, and 2) I did my best. As badly as I might have explained this, that or everything, I hope the intent of the post came through – i.e., that there’s a kind of cascade of failures happening around the Timbers right now. To sum it all up, the defense is what it is right now – I’m talking three little pigs with a house made of sticks at best – but the attacking/possession...structure(?) has no fucking business being as bad as it is right now, even with all the absent players. Or, even shorter, if these are all professionals, why doesn’t it look like it? Dammit.
Thus endeth the ramble. Will it get better? Almost certainly. When? Ah, now that’s a question.
Going the other way, do you think that would have changed the game?
I can count the good things the Timbers did in the attack on one hand, and probably before having resolve the eternal question of whether a thumb is a finger (it is not). That gets back to the two above adjectives, “aimless” and “useless.” I get that the quality of the starting players matters, but when a team fails on the field, shouldn’t it look more like a failure in execution instead of a failure in concept and/or planning? In other words, in a world where lesser players attempt to execute the same plays, you’d expect to see the same kinds of movement and runs, only with the passes under-hit, overcooked, or somehow otherwise incomplete...but, with Portland, you don’t. In fact, you don’t see much movement at all. At this point, I’m not sure what you see in the attack.
What’s even funnier – if for those with a darker sense of humor – is how I’d characterize what I saw with the Timbers’ defense tonight. First up, I thought Gio Savarese arranged the defensive posture in an interesting and debatable way. I saw what I’d call a mid-block – which, for me, means condensing the vertical space and fighting for the ball across what I’d call 20 yards on either side of the center-stripe (is that right?)) – and that kept the Timbers stable for as long as it lasted. Once that broke down, however – i.e., sometime passed Wiley’s opening goal – the Timbers adopted a different tactic – notably, one that mirrors what they do and/or don’t on offense.
The phrase I came up with to describe it was present staring. In practice, that amounts to every Timbers players taking a defensive positions somewhere between 3-4 yards away from the attacking player closest to them...and just staring at them, i.e., an act of being there and nothing more. They don't go after the ball, the players near the other players don't get tighter, they just got close and...watched them. In between the times Atlanta pulled them elbow from asshole – which, to float an opinion, happened more than you’d think based on Atlanta’s total shots – the Timbers just kind of...I guess the word is organized to gently confront anything and everything Atlanta attempted to do? In fewer words, I guess this is what you’d expect to see if your coach instructed you to keep shape above all else...and how’d that go?
If anyone came to this expecting more of a blow-by-blow, all I can say is 1) this game didn’t really deserve one, and 2) I did my best. As badly as I might have explained this, that or everything, I hope the intent of the post came through – i.e., that there’s a kind of cascade of failures happening around the Timbers right now. To sum it all up, the defense is what it is right now – I’m talking three little pigs with a house made of sticks at best – but the attacking/possession...structure(?) has no fucking business being as bad as it is right now, even with all the absent players. Or, even shorter, if these are all professionals, why doesn’t it look like it? Dammit.
Thus endeth the ramble. Will it get better? Almost certainly. When? Ah, now that’s a question.
You went for bees in your bonnet. Me- I'm thrashing about in the Slough of Despond. To answer your question about Eryk's disallowed goal- it confirmed in the team's mind that there was no way around it being a Very Bad Day in Atlanta. Same result, but maybe the team limped home to PDX with some (deluded?) sense of brighter times ahead.
ReplyDeleteOh, and yeah, Gio out. It's pretty well nailed down - we don't have a Pep G.leading our coaching brain trust. Because this team is definitely the creation of Gio. Or at worst, GW's decisions heavily influenced by the Gio dreams for a glorious future.
And the most maddening unknowable- the endless, bleeping injury list! The nature v. nurture discussion centering on artificial turf versus incompetent physios. The third factor maybe being that our sharp player deals were for too many guys made of Limoges china.