Los Angeles FC 3-2 Portland Timbers: Taking the Good from the Present

The top rock on the left fell off around the 65th.

Just when you’d given up, amirite? Ah, what could have been had the Portland Timbers played the entire game the way they played the final 30 minutes...

One thing I know for sure: I didn’t see Evander’s goal coming until Cristian Paredes’ dummy got the words, “holy shit,” halfway out of my mouth. Everything Portland did to that point rattled around the bad bandwidth of anxious and useless – and to the point that any sane person would have taken inflated odds against them scoring a second. And yet they did, with a goal that mirrored the scramble that teed up Los Angeles FC’s opener. That gave the game a nice sort of symmetry, even if on a see-saw that had only begun to tilt toward balance.

Two big questions hang over the Timbers’ 2-3 loss away to LAFC.

First, did you expect anything but a loss? Just as a thought exercise, put away all the specific complaints from today, forget the...concerning first half: quiet your mind and ask yourself, would you have picked the Timbers team you saw down the stretch in 2022 to go into the tougher half of Los Angeles in the second game of the next season (aka, March) and win that game? Sub-question: what do you think your answer would be if I told you that Dairon Asprilla, Sebastian Blanco, Felipe Mora and (why not?) Yimmi Chara would not be available before the game?

Admit it. You would have thought for, at most, a second before muttering, “yeah, they’re fucked.”

That’s for anyone who needs a pick-me-up after The Half That Shall Not Be Named.

The second question seems bigger to me – and I pose it without having a clear answer.

How much did the triple substitution at the 59th minute change the game? To refresh your memory (and you’re not alone), the Timbers replaced Santiago Moreno, Marvin Loria and Justin Rasmussen with Larrys Mabiala, Cristhian Paredes, and Claudio Bravo, respectively. Some gnashing of teeth flared up in my wee corner of twitter – the grounds was Portland “going defensive,” which isn’t a crazy thought – but the changes made decent sense in context – i.e., Gio traded a a little more beef in defense (aka, Mabiala) for a player whose touch appeared afflicted by nerves (aka, Moreno), a solid shuttler (aka, Paredes) for a stymied soloist (aka, Loria), and he almost unquestionably upgraded the left back position and threw more attacking juice into the mix when he replaced Rasmussen with Bravo.

I tried tot track the change in the Timbers’ shape after Gio turned over nearly one-third of the team, but I couldn’t quite get a handle on it. A couple other things happened – most notably, Diego Chara finally shook off the rust in the second half, and did you do a double-take every time you saw Dario Zuparic take a touch near the right touchline? – but the one thing I know for sure is that the game opened up for Portland right after those changes. Hell, did Evander’s goal come about precisely because LAFC hadn’t adjusted to Portland’s changes?

If I’m being honest, beats the hell out of me. Pushing Juan David (right?) Mosquera higher, as well as freeing him from defensive responsibility, seemed to help. A nudge-pass from Chara kicked off the break that Mosquera carried to Portland’s opener – he played the pass Paredes dummied, I believe – and, if he raised his hand when someone asked about the Timbers’ most consistent attacking piece so far, I don’t think many would object. For all that, the thing I either couldn’t or didn’t see was what happened with the Timbers midfield set up. Did Chara and, my man of the match, Eryk Williamson, drop deeper and line up even to throw a skirmishing line in front of the defense and play passes forward from a deeper position? Also, I saw someone tweet about Evander drifting left to find the ball and, given the way LAFC’s midfield three of Jose Cifuentes, Ilie Sanchez and Kellyn Acosta ran over Portland’s midfield for as long as they went head-to-head, my two thoughts on that are, 1) you are correct, sir, and 2) I don’t know whether he’ll do that every time, but it seemed like a good choice given how thoroughly LAFC dominated the middle of the field...until they didn’t, of course.

Olde tyme visual of the 1st half.

If you can figure out the precise things the Timbers did or adjusted to get back into this game, good on ya and please elaborate in the comments. Going the other way, was it something just as simple, e.g., LAFC simply fading? Their press looked effortless as picking a snoring drunk’s pockets for the first 60 minutes or so of the game. That pressure forced the Timbers to give up what felt like 1,000 corner kicks (actual number: six. huh.) and the slop that followed from those corner kicks led directly to LAFC’s first two goals (here's the second) – and, for the record, David Bingham’s tantrum after the Timbers gave up what then would have been LAFC’s third goal at that time (I think) tells you everything you need to know about Portland’s set-piece defending in the first half. Portland gave up one more goal when the same hunt/kill pressure knocked the ball off Chara’s toe and ended with Kwadwo Opoku taking what amounted to a penalty kick between two towers – not unlike minigolf, really...

So, to get back to the heartening stuff, the Timbers rallied mentally, and quite possibly tactically from the utter fucking meltdown squeezed into the paragraph above. A team that started the game with almost no composure ended it with a 10-fold increase in the same and managed to make a game of it by that process. If it followed from a change in formation, personnel, or parsing of duties, maybe start doing that all the time? I’m just spit-balling out here.

If I could tell you exactly what it was, I’d be nailing it to the gates of Providence Park like Luther nailing his theses into the door of that church in (was it?) Witburg. If I have a take-away from this loss it goes something like this: Gio’s last two starting XIs haven’t worked out and, yes, I do think there’s a better starting line-up available with the players Portland has available right now.

It’s all talking points from here, and in no particular order...

Getting the Most Out of Being Headless
Chris Rifer tweeted an argument that boiled down to saying that playing with Jaroslaw Niezgoda up top isn’t so different from playing a man down. The fact I just attempted to name his primary talent and came up empty sums it up nicely; whatever good thing he once did for the team dried up, so now he’s just this guy running around the opposition’s defenders who does no particular thing well. The attack did better than I believed it could over those last 30 minutes, but Niezgoda didn’t have much to do with that. Given that, I can see no reason not to start literally anyone else until Felipe Mora gets all the way back – Nathan Fogaca, Tega Ikoba, even Diego Gutierrez. If nothing else, Fogaca would give Portland a berserker up top.

One Hopeful Sign
With the exception of Eryk Williamson, Dario Zuparic, Zac McGraw’s heart, and second-half Diego Chara, most of the Timbers, starting and otherwise, fell a couple lumens short of shining tonight. That said, Williamson was the only one doing things that hinted at a higher level; I’d call today his best defensive effort since getting around the first team and he played at least five line-breakers that broke LAFC’s press. If he can hit that pass to the right player...which I’d call a work in progress, with semi-regularity, Portland should be able to put real pressure on opposing defenses almost as often. Very much related...

The Spendy New Kid
When Evander finds space, you can see the quality of his passing. As much as he has underwhelmed – i.e., more than I’d like to admit – he’s still finding his feet, not to mention where he fits on the field and how he can do the most damage therefrom. I’m sufficiently encouraged by the flashes to think Evander will get better once the players and/or Gio figure out how to help him find that space.

The Missing Puzzle Piece?
For what it’s worth, I see Paredes as a good piece in that scheme. A lot of that follows from wanting to keep Loria as far from the starting eleven as possible, but that still leaves open the question of where Paredes fits. Maybe a 3-2-2-2-1, i.e., a back three of McGraw, Zuparic and [_______], with Bravo and Mosquera wide as the first two, Chara and Williamson as the next two at the center, Paredes and Evander just a little higher and about as central, and with Fogaca running around like a methed-up border collie in front of all that (for now).

And...yeah, I think that’s everything. Still work to do, but three points from two games, with one of them away to LAFC, seems like an okay start. Are there problems? Oh, yeah. But isn’t there also time and, between players getting healthy and the potential for new players to come in, hope for improvement?

I both hope and think so.