FC Dallas 1-1 Portland Timbers: Better.

Dallas translated through bowling.

After a season that has started with what can only be called incompetence – which, at times came in the flaming variety - it felt pretty damn good to see the Portland Timbers achieve the opposite in yesterday’s 1-1 draw at FC Dallas.

Over the Timbers’ first five games of the season, I had to dig at least shoulder-deep into the barrel to pick out good performances. Zac McGraw’s name has come up in most games – take a bow, young man – Dario Zuparic almost as much, but the list has generally been short, allergic to padding and concentrated in the defense. The larger problems, not to mention the outright failures, have come at the collective level – i.e., players, even league legends (see, Chara, Diego) looking shaky playing the ball forward and an attack grabasstic up to the point of mutual incomprehensibility. Hope walked lightly on the land, in other words; outside of a couple promising starts that only felt more heartbreaking by promising more, her feet may have never even touched the ground.

Weighed against such a lowly level, the Timbers knocked it out of the park in Dallas yesterday. Without declaring this draw an actual turn-around, and with a full acknowledgement of the final score duly acknowledged, I’m content to call Portland’s first (more or less) quality game of 2023 a kind of win.

For all that, Dallas tends to offer a shifting yardstick. I noted in the preview that people rarely rate them as a contender and games like this get at why. They struggle to string together good results, which means they struggle to generate real, season-shaping momentum. Now, had Jesus Jimenez not strayed offside, thereby cancelling out the insurance goal/tap-in that Alan Velasco scored almost immediately after Dallas went ahead after Facundo Quignon made good on three minutes of pressure and as many corner kicks in the 74th, I feel confident saying that Portland would have been, in fact, fucked. So, yeah, Portland caught a break or two. Moreover, there was more than a little but for the divine (delighfully pissy) grace of Aljaz “All the Jazz” Ivacic, because the Timbers’ defense gave Dallas several cracks at both go-ahead and insurance goals...and gods only know why Portland would start anyone but Ivacic anytime he’s available at this point. If you haven’t seen some of his saves, do yourself some good and make your heart a little bigger by dipping into the highlights from this one.

To close the thought on Dallas, their present, preferred set-up doesn’t often generate defense-breaking chances – aka, how a team juices just 1.0 xG out of 17 shots (and hold that thought) – and that lack of O-face “oomph” seems like the barrier between them and better-than-goodness. For all the buzzing around they do, the front-line trio of Velasco, Paul Arriola (largely absent yesterday), and Jesus Ferreira tend to do most of it in front of the defense. If they can get behind the defense and pull the ball back, Dallas can generate clean looks, but, so long as a defense can either stay between them and the goal or push them into the channels when they try do break though – as the Timbers largely did yesterday, and to their credit – it’s a lot of huffing and puffing. I wondered what would happen when new signing Jesus Jimenez came on for Sebastian Lletget at the 65th and was left wondering why Nico Estevez doesn’t start him more often once he did (wait, hold that one too). It just seems like having a clearer focal point for all that movement could sharpen an attack that really needs it. And that led to something else: a game with a West Texas-sized kind of wide-open nothing.

Neither team generated a lot of great offense. If you asked me to explain the first half in as few numbers and words as possible, I’d point to the 0.02 v 0.20 xG at the 33rd minute. The Timbers owe that 0.18 edge to their rare dangerous counter that came just three minutes before, a move that also saw Nathan Fogaca cut inside and spring Juan David Mosquera with a pass I didn’t know he could hit, Mosquera hold the ball until he got the correct angle on the best pass to tee up a shot, and then Fogaca come across and cut off Santiago Moreno’s best shot at an opening goal, a one-time shot. I have all kinds of thoughts about that – ongoing resistance to the idea that a ball that hits the frame doesn’t count as a shot on goal among them (because that was the game’s best chance to that point and seeing zero shots on goal for Portland at the half erases that) – but the larger takeaways are that, 1) Moreno managed a great shot, despite everything (and Nathan), and 2) the Timbers ended the game with six shots total and just two on goal, and a positively paltry 0.3 xG. And that’s just one of several things that beg the question of how I can title this post “Better.”

Here's why.

Soarin'! Flyin'! There's not a place in heaven, etc.

The Timbers played the ball out of the back with fair reliability and no one – Chara included, because he’s been sloppier than usual to start 2023 – coughed up any lethal giveaways. That means the composure was better and, no less important, that meant the defense rarely found itself two passes away from buck-naked exposed. Again, little things mean a lot. The pissant xG aside – seriously, the attack soared as high as the Spruce Goose – Portland looked better going forward and more attuned to how to find space to make that happen than they have all season. Moreno, in particular, looked closer to his 2022 self – e.g., finding pockets to receive the ball at his feet and receiving it well, which meant he could turn (fundamentals, people; trapping), and that was its own reward. I’d argue that, despite doing something close to nothing, Fogaca had his best game of 2023 and just those few things mentioned above, along with the return of Mosquera mattered – even if it wasn’t anything more than giving the defense some time to collect itself. And now for the actually encouraging points...

Portland started to sift in its substitutions shortly before Dallas called on Jimenez and their goal-scorer, Quignon. The consequential sub was Dairon Asprilla (Jaroslaw Niezgoda was his inconsequential echo), and he made his presence felt with his usual bull-in-a-china-shop subtlety – i.e., flying around generally and providing a kind of mobile wall for other players to bounce off in the attacking third. I say this without shitting Nathan – who, gods bless him, puts in every shift – but having a presence up top felt all kinds of comforting. It’s the difference to playing to someone with a chance of holding onto possession for the next move versus playing to someone and knowing that was your one and only shot for that move.

That’s precisely what led to Portland’s equalizer. Having Asprilla on the end of the half-hopeful ball Chara floated into the channel in stoppage time meant having a player fast and strong enough to make that outside in run and knock it into Franck Boli’s path for the shot. Boli still had to strike a good ball - and I think Brian Dunseth does a good job of explaining it in that clip – but Boli doesn’t get that shot without Asprilla making that run. Seriously, you would try that 100 times with Fogaca or Niezgoda and never see it come off.

Because I wasn’t tuned in (which, here, means on twitter) as the game unfolded, I don’t have the usual sense of how Timbers fans felt as they watched. Part of me thinks people saw all the attacks go nowhere, the bad set-piece defending on the goal, and so on. This is a week where I’d encourage people to focus on the good things. If you take away the kick in the nuts that made Atlanta live up to the “dirty” in the Dirty South and what should be the expected getting run over at LAFC, Portland’s defense hasn’t been awful. It’s the attack that has to launch and, between Boli’s signing and, hopefully, continued good health (seriously, don’t break Franck) and players coming back from injury, the best-case will see this as just another shitty March for the Timbers.

I won’t deny that the stretch ahead blows and that it’ll require a little more psychic resilience, but this was, per the title, better. Here’s to hoping all those little things continue, even if (ideally) some of the results don’t. Till the next one...