[DISREGARD] Closing Shop, Bon Chance, Bon Voyage and Adios [DISREGARD]

I promised myself at the beginning of this season that I'd pack things up if the number of hits the posts get fell below a certain number.

They have.

I don't know what happened - e.g., did people lose interest in what I do (probably), did the community of people who used to frequent this site get wise and/or the hell of twitter (almost certainly)?

None of that matters, at least not to me. I'm certainly not offended if this site went stale for people, never mind disappointed or hurt. Things come to an end, no matter how good, bad or average. Conifers & Citrus just became the next one....that said, just humor me and tell me it was slightly above average.

Now feels like a good time to acknowledge, yes, I have shuttered this blog a couple times, maybe even several. And that feels like a good thing to lump in with the possible causes of decline and death.

It has been fun kicking thoughts about the Portland Timbers, FC Cincinnati and Major League Soccer for all these seasons. I'm looking forward to watching games like a normal person and....don't tell anyone this, but bouncing around games as the spirit moves instead of in service of Content.

Take care, y'all.

 

Promise I'll just say I'm taking a break going forward.

Real Salt Lake 0-0 Portland Timbers: Getting Satisfaction Out of a Snooze

Exaggerated? Absolutely. But...look!

I can’t count the number of times I’ve started a post with some spin on, “I’ll keep this brief,” but I think I have it this time. [NOTE: He does not.]

Real Salt Lake came out swinging strong and, yeah, that got me wondering about where things would go. Near as I can tell, it took literally one bop on the nose – i.e., a sequence where the Timbers methodically worked the ball through RSL’s press (more of a presence thing, than running players down) and capped the sequence with a quality shot on goal by the oft-(over?*) praised Evander – for RSL to gamble less and/or swing for the fences too early and more often.

This game didn’t have game-states so much as it had moments. One team or another would create an opportunity – say, RSL finding space for Andres Gomez on RSL’s right – some of those would lead to actual chances, but neither team ever really got all over the other one. Small wonder the announcers (kicking it old school with Max Bretos and Brian Dunseth) fixated on every time a player hit the post. It happened three times, though not all those chances weren’t created equal.

That wasn’t wholly unreasonable. This was a classic game where the team that scored first had a 75% or better chance of winning it...and here comes the reveal. Woo. The game ended 0-0.

In fairness, plenty of those openings yawned wide enough – e.g., that time in the opening minutes when Gomez opened enough space to for a strip mall with a cut on Claudio Bravo. There was also the header Aljaz Ivacic could do no better than swat away (have to imagine it's in here somewhere), the Jefferson Savarino free-kick that left Ivacic standing and praying at the same time, Dairon Asprilla hitting one of those shots off the post (the best one, for my money) just one minute later, or Justen Glad’s devilish knuckler that Ivacic slapped away like a hot potato dipped in roadkill. It’s less that nothing happened, than not a whole lot and very little of interest did.

It's possible I flagged the wrong weakness for RSL in my distended preview (scroll down). Bluntly, they seemed to give up once their best moments dried up – hitting highly hopeful shots from range, attempting passes that felt like real-time proofs of the perfect being the enemy of the good, slowing down when they should have sped up, etc. Bottom line, they ran out of ideas and vividly. I saw plenty of people slam the announcing team, but they clung to one telling detail, and rightly so: RSL hasn’t scored in 370(+) minutes. You could see why tonight.If I were an RSL fan, I’d be ripping my hair out....oh, wait, I watched the Timbers first fives games of 2023. RSL fans don’t know pain...

A Casual Fan's MLS Review/Preview, Weeks 12/13: 1,000 Licks to a Disappointing Center of a Tootsie Pop

Seriously. None taken.

Recent fans of Major League Soccer should be familiar with the way a bunch of teams settle in the middle of the table and languish there for the remainder of the season, neither rising nor falling, trading wins for losses or just racking up the ties. I feel like the phenomenon has gotten worse in recent seasons, but nostalgia also has its way of fogging the mind.

At any rate, it feels like that bullshit arrived ahead of schedule this season in the form of, get this, eight (8!) teams in the Eastern Conference sitting on 15 points, along with the Portland Timbers in West. The West’s doughy middle is nowhere near as expansive – honestly, I’d locate and limit its center around Portland, Houston Dynamo FC and the Vancouver Whitecaps (both on 14 points) – and they’ve generally done a better job of producing a class of haves and have nots.

That sucks in the real world, of course – no man should collect $5 billion annually while 50,000 families struggle to get food to the table – but a professional sports league needs such a divide to create both grand clashes and epic upsets....have a mentioned that MLS Week 13 looks like a a bit of a dud yet?

In defense of all the above, the East’s big squishy middle – and even the West’s slimmer, better-distributed one – came about precisely due to unexpected losses and surprise wins (see the bless'd, holy Form Guide). For instance, the Philadelphia Union finally started to look like themselves after rattling off three straight wins, while all three of Inter Miami CF, Club de Foot Montreal and Charlotte FC rose to the East’s fatted center by way of more or less unbroken winning streaks. Other teams took the opposite path, sinking into the middle after baiting too many pundits into seeing too much glory in too many games – e.g., Columbus Crew SC – while Minnesota United has fallen straight through the West’s middle and with no bottom yet sighted.

That’s bit chintzy for a review, I get it, but this is one of those damned weeks where the league doesn’t give a man a chance to look around and...really take things in. “MLS Week 13” kicks off 4:30 tomorrow, after all, and MLS Week 14 kicks off just three days later and at the same time, fer Christ’s sakes.

Portland Timbers 3-1 Vancouver Whitecaps: They Wore Green and Gold (Yes!)...And It Was Good

If you know, you know.

Forgive me Father, Mother Mary Full of Grace (full of grace! full of grace!), the bless’d angels and the Holy Spirit, I turned off my late, late viewing of the Portland Timbers 3-1 win over the Vancouver Whitecaps at the 85th minute.

And yet I’ll argue that made decent sense.

To start with something I saw in a tweet – and by no means am I shitting on the original tweeter (and I couldn’t tell you who it was, gun to my head) – I saw this described as (paraphrasing) “the Timbers making a pretty good Vancouver side look pedestrian.” I want to dig into that from two directions.

First, how good are the Whitecaps, really? My best description: better than the av-e-rage team, but only just. That’s on a high-level, nuts ‘n’ bolts level – e.g., their goals for (15) and goals against (12) against the league average (14.24) – but I have a couple thoughts in my head that push back against the “but numbers love them” argument.

Eight of those 15 goals came in two games – the recent 3-2 win versus Minnesota United FC and the earlier 5-0 drubbing of Club de Foot Montreal (aka, Simon Becher's debutante ball) three weeks before the latter got their groove on. Yeah, yeah, the ‘Caps beat the Timbers at BC Place some weeks ago – a game that...did not go well for Portland (though I did search for silver linings with a magnifying glass and tweezers) – but I also just ticked through Vancouver’s every win of 2023 and none of those teams rolled into the foot of the Canadian Rockies as their best selves (though the Timbers were one game from the/some shit straightening). In a lot of ways, and to lift up a cliche that answers “but the numbers” cliche, The ‘Caps are exactly what their record says they are: a middle-table team. But that’s just starts the answer...

I’ve watched all or large portions of five Vancouver games this season and...well, they’ve never “wowed” me. As I said in the last preview, I see them as a team that goes about the business in a very business-like way; those of you who watched at home might have heard Ross Smith’s digression about “no outstanding players” and that’s just a big “yep.” The phrase “collective spirit” stands in for “no one really spectacular to see” not so much nicely as appropriately, soccer players making soccer plays, etc.

The Weakly, MLS Week 11 & 12: A (Long) Telephone-Style Conversation Between Two Weekends

And we are sad about it.

Just a wee wrinkle to the formula for this week’s Weakly: I’m making these posts more of a dialogue with the previous week’s post (here you go, for reference). So long as these Weakly reviews amount to an examination of expectations, why not build the Grand Narrative from that?

Also, and to spare all y’all a little time, I’m going to reduce the review notes for MLS Week 11 into a succession of bullet-points with some links tossed in. With that, let’s have...

The Story of MLS Week 11...
...and in the order they played the games.

New York City fed the doubting rumors about their road form with a 3-2 road loss at a Charlotte FC team suddenly showing the faintest of pulses; Enzo Copetti scored a nice pair.

FC Cincinnati keeps doing the business at home – where they are perfect, btw – with a 2-1 win over DC United (and Alvaro Barreal's net-buster deserves a shout!), while DC reverted to playing the valiant losers...and here’s where I acknowledge that, yes, we have no bananas...I mean, I won’t be doing stand-alone Cincinnati posts anymore. No audience, you see...

Inter Miami CF both exceeded expectations in their 2-1 home win over Atlanta United FC and supported my theory about Atlanta’s shaky defense – i.e., it’s the second shakiest in the East (hello, Charlotte!) and tied for the second-worst defense in MLS with...fuck me, the Portland Timbers. Josef Martinez stepped into history (100 goals scored) with a fun one.

Did Club de Foot Montreal turn the corner with its 2-0 home win versus Orlando City SC, or has Orlando simply become the living symbol for MLS famed unpredictability?

Red Bull New York has looked nothing if not beatable all season long, but would a CCL-weary Philadelphia Union team be the victims they need? Nope! Philly won 1-0 on the road and Gerhard Struber hit the road this morning. Tidy!

The San Jose Earthquakes also got a potentially innervated side, but, as noted below, I think that only helped them see out their 2-1 home win over Los Angeles FC.

Portland Timbers 2-2 Austin FC: A Test of Character (& Budgeting)

The Portland Timbers’ 2-2 home draw versus Austin FC gored at least one theory, but otherwise felt like weights falling on both sides of the scale. To be clear, I hated seeing the damn thing balance as much as any Timbers fan...like I said at the top of last night’s game thread, this was an occasion where the Timbers didn’t want to do anything they wouldn’t later regret. And then they went ahead and started Larrys Mabiala....I kid, I kid.

I’ll get to something like a match report in the next – sorry, no, one two three paragraphs after - paragraph, but I want to linger on Larrys for a bit (note: that’s a good adult film title, right?). For all their faults – and this is literally one of them – the Portland Timbers have brought me to an understanding of the true nature of defending. Those “[___] Days Since our Last Accident/Accidental Decapitation” signs at your local light-industry warehouse offers the perfect metaphor: the whole thing is about avoiding the next mistake for as long as possible, only all while knowing the mistake will come. Typing as someone who got dumped into the defense far more often than made sense (I sucked at defending), I wholly, fully and unashamedly embrace the argument that defenses get faulted for their failure to never fail in a way that the attacking side of any team rarely does...good Lord, these things are getting confessional.

Anyhoo, and to finally get back to Larrys, his game last night had a familiar pattern: he was fine for large stretches of the game – he even cleaned up a mess than Juan David Mosquera handed to him on a steaming, stinking platter – and then, nothing like out of the blue, Austin’s Owen “Coach’s Son” Wolff finds a bunch of space on Portland’s left late in the game (but not for the first time) and curls a cross into the heart of the defense. Now, I want to ask everyone reading this post to stop here and look at the Austin equalizer that yanked two points from the Timbers’ grasping hands. The video geeks did well with it, for what it’s worth, giving you plenty of time to see that Mabiala kept pretty fair track of Austin’s Will Bruin, he knew where he was and all that, only to somehow get separated in the decisive moment. Bruin almost certainly bumped him, but Larrys just played that whole thing wrong – if in a way I visible in 20/20 hindsight. Still, one lapse equals one goal allowed too often to count and the Timbers still lost two points on one brain fart...or two, if you want to count the fact that either Wolff and Ethan Finlay had time to whip in that cross.

MLS Week 10/11 Review/Preview: Deep in the Season (and on the Disco Round)

A tapestry...of cats! (I'm crazy cat people, no judgment)

Yes, I’m changing the format. Can we just....not do this again, Cassie?

First, and because I think that’s where the demand is, I’m stuffing most of the actual data into the preview section – and, as always, the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati both get “chunky” previews, even if I’ve slimmed them down a bit. Second, I’m accepting defeat and embracing the dread and feeble bullet- point format. What can I say? It just works better than a trying to stitch a long and winding tale out of disparate parts.

And, wrapping up the preamble, because the editorial board has decided I don’t bring enough beef to the reviews, I’m thinning those out to the point of emaciation – and, to be clear, this has nothing to do with laziness (I’m nothing if not a masochist (call me)) or an aversion to reading an epic into a single result. Very much related, what we have now are results – i.e., cold, hard data that knocks down every “but the underlying numbers” and “when [Your Team’s Disappointing DP Here] comes good” you see laced into every match report, very much including the ones I write...

...and yet, as every fan of Major League Soccer knows, all it takes to get to the beginning of beautiful season is a three-game winning streak.

Now, I’m going to note and comment on all the games in MLS Week 10 – i.e., that is give you the result, a link to resources that will tell you more about it, and then add very few words about how much said result made...the Earth...move...under your feet. Finally, I shit you not, I am totally committing to bullet points.

MLS Week 10 Review(...even if there are hella 9s out there, even a couple 8s under “GP” in the table)
Nashville SC 3-1 Atlanta United FC
This one should have put all, or at least most, doubts to bed that Nashville has announced itself in the East, but Atlanta’s still fine, just fine, if without showing any signs of contending.

Columbus Crew SC 1-2 Inter Miami CF
Good for Miami, obviously (and they’re gonna need it; Jean Mota down, repeat, Jean Mota down), but the interesting thing’s what happened to Columbus over their past two games.

DC United 3-0 Charlotte FC
Is that Charlotte I see swirling down the toilet?