If you’ve got time to listen to an old man ramble, by all means pull up a chair.
To start with the weird one, a large part of me thought it would never happen. I’ve seen fans calling for Giovanni Savarese’s head since at least the middle of 2021. Some of that baying, though not all, rested on a clear belief that he was a singular kind of problem, that his tactics bound Portland Timbers players in chains ‘n’ whips. It was his failure to appreciate the arsenal he had at his disposal, basically, and to deploy it to maximal, devastating effect against any and all opposition that held the team back.
That line of thinking very likely kept me off the “Gio Out” wagon for six months, maybe even more. I’ve seen Portland’s roster and that’s bug-fuck crazy.
It’ll go on like this till I peter out. Something about the whole thing has me feeling philosophical about spectator sports and people earning their daily bread with a barking peanut gallery judging everything they do. Anyway, back to it...
Some part of me genuinely did think the Timbers front office would keep Gio on for another season, maybe even more. Most of the analogies popping into my head involve furniture – i.e., dad’s favorite recliner – even if I can’t land them, but I hope the association makes some sense. Some others about a death in the family burbled up – and you can’t help but wonder how people relate to that metaphor – but I’m miles removed from that kind of fallout. I suppose it’s an idea of turning around and expecting to see something that’s always there, only to find it’s gone.
I’ve always liked Savarese. Seeing local journalists – e.g., Sam Svilar and Abe Asher – praise his openness and good nature helped that along, but, even when he and the team struggled, I wanted him, specifically, to turn it around. He seemed likeable enough for me to not want to see him fail.
I think the best answer to The Big Question – i.e., how much of 2022 and what looked (powerfully) like a dead-end 2023 season was Gio’s fault – is that we’re about to find out.
The funny thing about that: Timbers fans may never get an answer. I don’t mean that in the sense that everyone, or even most people will accept; I mean that the reasons for last season’s failure and this season’s struggles could continue as a never-ending argument where one group blames the roster and another kicks around Gio’s legacy, while still another rages against the front office and general manager (here, I’m just talking about the on-field stuff, as opposed to the potential actionable stuff off of it).
Alternatively, the Timbers’ next permanent hire may get a starting XI lined up and clicking right. Barring the Timbers can somehow keep this exact same roster until we're all satisfied as to the best and truest answer, that’s the only way we’ll know it was Gio.
To finally introduce some facts to the wake, The Official Statement on the “parting of ways” (gods bless the euphemisms) noted that Savarese compiled an all-time record of 74-62-47. First, that’s a whopping 183 games – not so surprising, seeing that he’s been with the team since 2018 – but let us pause to acknowledge that his biggest top-line number fell into the “wins” category; and yet, let us also acknowledge that also adds up to a 40% rate of actual success- i.e., wins - and who knew soccer management only takes being a couple numbers better than great in baseball?
Blessed with the sense Mother gave me, I decided against reviewing the six years’ worth of posts I have saved to various hard drives. I did, however, walk through the schedule/results of seasons past, as well as the final conference standings for each of them, in an attempt to jog my memory. It’s something I’d encourage any Timbers fan to do (start your journey(s) here and here), because, on some level, it gets to how memory works. Mine sucks, by the way, which means forgetting fairly major details like Portland playing in the CONCACAF Champions’ Cup in 2021. (Good job, guys! Good job, Gio!)
Speaking of, the last time I felt actual disappointment as a Timbers fan was MLS Cup 2021. Portland didn’t play a great game that day, but Felipe Mora’s late, late, late equalizer (stilll get emotional!) made miracles seem possible, even if that dried up when New York City FC won on penalty kicks.
Fun fact about their regular season records under Gio: outside the freak 2020 season*, Portland never finished higher than fourth in the West. The main thing that stands out in all of that is less the infamous months of March than how fast and reliably they recovered from them in every season from 2018 through 2021. The flip-side of that is no less important: Each of those same seasons saw the Timbers wilt violently for a stretch – e,g., the brutal August of 2018 giving way to an erratic September, 2019’s slow fade to a whimper, or the decidedly patchy summer of 2021. They recovered from all that, often really, really well, but I remember going into MLS Cup 2018 knowing they’d have to play a couple miles above their heads to avoid getting run over. Touching the slippery underbelly of glory. Kind of Portland's jam...
To start with the weird one, a large part of me thought it would never happen. I’ve seen fans calling for Giovanni Savarese’s head since at least the middle of 2021. Some of that baying, though not all, rested on a clear belief that he was a singular kind of problem, that his tactics bound Portland Timbers players in chains ‘n’ whips. It was his failure to appreciate the arsenal he had at his disposal, basically, and to deploy it to maximal, devastating effect against any and all opposition that held the team back.
That line of thinking very likely kept me off the “Gio Out” wagon for six months, maybe even more. I’ve seen Portland’s roster and that’s bug-fuck crazy.
It’ll go on like this till I peter out. Something about the whole thing has me feeling philosophical about spectator sports and people earning their daily bread with a barking peanut gallery judging everything they do. Anyway, back to it...
Some part of me genuinely did think the Timbers front office would keep Gio on for another season, maybe even more. Most of the analogies popping into my head involve furniture – i.e., dad’s favorite recliner – even if I can’t land them, but I hope the association makes some sense. Some others about a death in the family burbled up – and you can’t help but wonder how people relate to that metaphor – but I’m miles removed from that kind of fallout. I suppose it’s an idea of turning around and expecting to see something that’s always there, only to find it’s gone.
I’ve always liked Savarese. Seeing local journalists – e.g., Sam Svilar and Abe Asher – praise his openness and good nature helped that along, but, even when he and the team struggled, I wanted him, specifically, to turn it around. He seemed likeable enough for me to not want to see him fail.
I think the best answer to The Big Question – i.e., how much of 2022 and what looked (powerfully) like a dead-end 2023 season was Gio’s fault – is that we’re about to find out.
The funny thing about that: Timbers fans may never get an answer. I don’t mean that in the sense that everyone, or even most people will accept; I mean that the reasons for last season’s failure and this season’s struggles could continue as a never-ending argument where one group blames the roster and another kicks around Gio’s legacy, while still another rages against the front office and general manager (here, I’m just talking about the on-field stuff, as opposed to the potential actionable stuff off of it).
Alternatively, the Timbers’ next permanent hire may get a starting XI lined up and clicking right. Barring the Timbers can somehow keep this exact same roster until we're all satisfied as to the best and truest answer, that’s the only way we’ll know it was Gio.
To finally introduce some facts to the wake, The Official Statement on the “parting of ways” (gods bless the euphemisms) noted that Savarese compiled an all-time record of 74-62-47. First, that’s a whopping 183 games – not so surprising, seeing that he’s been with the team since 2018 – but let us pause to acknowledge that his biggest top-line number fell into the “wins” category; and yet, let us also acknowledge that also adds up to a 40% rate of actual success- i.e., wins - and who knew soccer management only takes being a couple numbers better than great in baseball?
Blessed with the sense Mother gave me, I decided against reviewing the six years’ worth of posts I have saved to various hard drives. I did, however, walk through the schedule/results of seasons past, as well as the final conference standings for each of them, in an attempt to jog my memory. It’s something I’d encourage any Timbers fan to do (start your journey(s) here and here), because, on some level, it gets to how memory works. Mine sucks, by the way, which means forgetting fairly major details like Portland playing in the CONCACAF Champions’ Cup in 2021. (Good job, guys! Good job, Gio!)
Speaking of, the last time I felt actual disappointment as a Timbers fan was MLS Cup 2021. Portland didn’t play a great game that day, but Felipe Mora’s late, late, late equalizer (stilll get emotional!) made miracles seem possible, even if that dried up when New York City FC won on penalty kicks.
Fun fact about their regular season records under Gio: outside the freak 2020 season*, Portland never finished higher than fourth in the West. The main thing that stands out in all of that is less the infamous months of March than how fast and reliably they recovered from them in every season from 2018 through 2021. The flip-side of that is no less important: Each of those same seasons saw the Timbers wilt violently for a stretch – e,g., the brutal August of 2018 giving way to an erratic September, 2019’s slow fade to a whimper, or the decidedly patchy summer of 2021. They recovered from all that, often really, really well, but I remember going into MLS Cup 2018 knowing they’d have to play a couple miles above their heads to avoid getting run over. Touching the slippery underbelly of glory. Kind of Portland's jam...
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| In a pandemic! Stoked! |
* For anyone wondering, I treat the 2020 season as a different animal for the simple reason that there was no real “regular season.” Shit was a mess. And yet, as noted in my reply to a really fun reddit post, the MLS Is Back Tournament is one of my happiest memories of the pandemic. Feeling like part of a community, even if only up to the knees, was an actual blessing.
Despite having a literal MLS legend on its roster (Diego Valeri), the Timbers have never, still don’t, and probably never will field a great team. My three core memories of the 2015 Championship season include the double-post game and winning MLS Cup, of course, but it also includes totally writing off the Timbers in mid-fucking-September – and with good reason – before they went on the 11-game unbeaten streak that won them the title. They drew exactly two games over that stretch, both of them legs in a home-and-away playoff series, but that’s still a mind-blowing 29 points of 33 on offer. And yet, the reasonable impulse to write them off feels like an annual thing. The kind of faith-drunk run they pulled together once under Caleb Porter and twice under Savarese feel like the actual flukes to me.
The Timbers are streaky and plucky, basically.
If all of that felt like a digression away from Giovanni Savarese, that wasn't the intention, I assure you. My point was to highlight how much the Savarese era carried forward the regular themes of Timbers’ history.
The funny thing is how much that matched his career as a player. The main thing I remember about watching him play for the (this is a real name) New York/New Jersey MetroStars was how many of the goals he scored (more than you’d think) came from a combination of raw effort and yanking them out of his ass (found this gem). For what it’s worth, I think he coached the Timbers in the same spirit – specifically, in the improvisational spirit of a forward.
Making that work requires a certain level of not just confidence, but also buy-in. And I’d argue he pulled that off for, with the (hardcore) pandemic year thrown in, four fairly impressive seasons. I’d also argue that’s a shakier foundation to build on than most teams can handle; it’s certainly not the path to lasting, eternal success – and it’s far fucking harder to make progress on that path when the resources either aren’t there, or when they fail to meet actual requirements.
I don’t know whether all the above makes me the wrong person when it comes to offering an in-depth considered perspective of Giovanni Savarese’s time steering the Timbers as close to glory as he could get them. Again, I liked the guy and, on that specific level, all this has a too-soon feel to it that I can’t fully reconcile with a full year in the “Gio Out” camp. The prospect of finding a better coach strikes me as anything but guanaranteed. At the end of it all, I don’t think I have an adequate answer to the question, if not Gio, then who? My only real thought is that, the head coach has to get better, if only because I worry it could be a long, long fucking time before the roster does. It’s just easier to replace one cog in the machine than four or five of them.
By way of closing out, the nature of fandom is very much on my mind tonight. When I logged back online after Sunday’s loss, I saw an entire reddit thread (and not a bad one) devoted to what people did after they turned off Sunday’s game. I get that impulse on one level, while being unable to wrap my head around it on two or three others. For me, following the Timbers is just something I do. The reasons are “stupid” on the same level of the automatic nervous system – i.e., it happens because it does, and that’s as far as it goes. For better or worse, this is what I do for pleasure, even when it causes me pain.
At this point, my biggest worry is that the Timbers will become a kind of zombie franchise a la the Chicago Fire – i.e., a fanbase fractured from its front office, a team forever struggling to pull shit and guts back together on the field. Journeys into the wilderness don’t happen often in Major League Soccer, but that only makes it more of a shame-level event when it does happen (speaking of, I really must update my historical data spreadsheet). Based on the well-reasoned and historically-proven theory that a successful team attracts better talent – and on the simple grounds that actual potential for winning trophies motivates players – the Timbers have a smaller margin for error than most of America’s bigger market teams. Call me crazy, but Chicago strikes me as a bigger market than Portland, and that only makes their struggles feel more like a cautionary tale flapping its arms in warning as the Timbers hire their next coach.
Here's to hoping both the Portland Timbers and Giovanni Savarese land on their feet, even if circumstances mean they’ll do it separately.
Despite having a literal MLS legend on its roster (Diego Valeri), the Timbers have never, still don’t, and probably never will field a great team. My three core memories of the 2015 Championship season include the double-post game and winning MLS Cup, of course, but it also includes totally writing off the Timbers in mid-fucking-September – and with good reason – before they went on the 11-game unbeaten streak that won them the title. They drew exactly two games over that stretch, both of them legs in a home-and-away playoff series, but that’s still a mind-blowing 29 points of 33 on offer. And yet, the reasonable impulse to write them off feels like an annual thing. The kind of faith-drunk run they pulled together once under Caleb Porter and twice under Savarese feel like the actual flukes to me.
The Timbers are streaky and plucky, basically.
If all of that felt like a digression away from Giovanni Savarese, that wasn't the intention, I assure you. My point was to highlight how much the Savarese era carried forward the regular themes of Timbers’ history.
The funny thing is how much that matched his career as a player. The main thing I remember about watching him play for the (this is a real name) New York/New Jersey MetroStars was how many of the goals he scored (more than you’d think) came from a combination of raw effort and yanking them out of his ass (found this gem). For what it’s worth, I think he coached the Timbers in the same spirit – specifically, in the improvisational spirit of a forward.
Making that work requires a certain level of not just confidence, but also buy-in. And I’d argue he pulled that off for, with the (hardcore) pandemic year thrown in, four fairly impressive seasons. I’d also argue that’s a shakier foundation to build on than most teams can handle; it’s certainly not the path to lasting, eternal success – and it’s far fucking harder to make progress on that path when the resources either aren’t there, or when they fail to meet actual requirements.
I don’t know whether all the above makes me the wrong person when it comes to offering an in-depth considered perspective of Giovanni Savarese’s time steering the Timbers as close to glory as he could get them. Again, I liked the guy and, on that specific level, all this has a too-soon feel to it that I can’t fully reconcile with a full year in the “Gio Out” camp. The prospect of finding a better coach strikes me as anything but guanaranteed. At the end of it all, I don’t think I have an adequate answer to the question, if not Gio, then who? My only real thought is that, the head coach has to get better, if only because I worry it could be a long, long fucking time before the roster does. It’s just easier to replace one cog in the machine than four or five of them.
By way of closing out, the nature of fandom is very much on my mind tonight. When I logged back online after Sunday’s loss, I saw an entire reddit thread (and not a bad one) devoted to what people did after they turned off Sunday’s game. I get that impulse on one level, while being unable to wrap my head around it on two or three others. For me, following the Timbers is just something I do. The reasons are “stupid” on the same level of the automatic nervous system – i.e., it happens because it does, and that’s as far as it goes. For better or worse, this is what I do for pleasure, even when it causes me pain.
At this point, my biggest worry is that the Timbers will become a kind of zombie franchise a la the Chicago Fire – i.e., a fanbase fractured from its front office, a team forever struggling to pull shit and guts back together on the field. Journeys into the wilderness don’t happen often in Major League Soccer, but that only makes it more of a shame-level event when it does happen (speaking of, I really must update my historical data spreadsheet). Based on the well-reasoned and historically-proven theory that a successful team attracts better talent – and on the simple grounds that actual potential for winning trophies motivates players – the Timbers have a smaller margin for error than most of America’s bigger market teams. Call me crazy, but Chicago strikes me as a bigger market than Portland, and that only makes their struggles feel more like a cautionary tale flapping its arms in warning as the Timbers hire their next coach.
Here's to hoping both the Portland Timbers and Giovanni Savarese land on their feet, even if circumstances mean they’ll do it separately.
Responding tardily, due my relationship with technology...
ReplyDeleteA great retrospective on Gio. In hindsight, I think I was finally in the Gio-Out camp mainly because all man-manager style coaches have a finite bag of tricks and Gio had rummaged thru his to the point of futile repetition. And a work group only wants to hear the same motivational speaker's mantras so many times. Maybe the club will avoid the zombie fate with another huge bit of luck like Valeri. But, as you said, our small-market margin for error is tight.
I expect Gio to land on his feet and give us reason to second-guess ourselves about the breakup- 'cause that's just how sports works.
Saw your recent Reddit post on the most frustrating Timbers signings. I'm in your camp. Gotta think that a bunch of your naysayer commenters would respond more objectively if Yimmi's last name had been, say, Lopez not Chara. Looks like a ton of people had some Ted Lasso fantasy in their head where the Charas became the toast of the MLS media as The Brothers Chara. Because of the official team expectation placed on DP Yimmi, it was a very disappointing signing. Sorry.
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it. And your note about Gio landing on his feet and revving up another team...shit, I'm not even sure I've braced myself for it yet.
ReplyDeleteThe reddit post was something - good Lord, did I get roasted on some of that - but I made the mistake of naming a candidate and that led to the reasonable response of people arguing about that specific choice instead of naming their own candidate. Live and learn...
...but, yeah, the Yimmi Chara signing really did feel like fan service. And I've got a lifetime's worth of pop culture hang-ups about that shit.