Portland Timbers 2-2 DC United: Fragility & Composure

The Portland Timbers had all three points in their sweaty palms against DC United tonight only to piss two of them away one raised arm and one catastrophic failure in weak-side defending at a time. One thing led to another and that led to a 2-2 draw-that-felt-like-a-loss final score and...disappointment. Explaining all this gets a little tricky and I want to thank the person who posts as brettcalvin42 on the Timbers subreddit for forcing me to think a little harder about all this.

After a cautious opening minute or three, DC kicked into the fast-zombie press I expected from them. Like any press, it’s designed to force and feast on errors and it started to work its dark magic until Santiago Moreno pulled the classic soccer judo move of letting a ball pass across his body to carry it past a lunging DC defender (probably Pedro Santos). With the wide spaces of the right open to him, Moreno slipped a pass into Dairon Asprilla who finished off the play neatly as you like: 1-0 to the Timbers. And, as good things follow from good deeds, that break seemed to unsettle the one-way certainty of DC’s press. Despite all the buzzing harassment, the Timbers left the field at halftime with a slim but real advantage on the attacking side. They worked transition as well as they ever have and had a real chance to score one more when Moreno found an Eryk Williamson run that twisted DC’s (I think) Christopher McVey damn near out of his shoes.

All that inspired me to chime in with a short note that ended with “I’m happy” on a game thread on the Timbers subreddit. brettcalvin42 took issue with the general statement with a curt note about how giving the ball away was killing the Timbers. Even as I stand by what I…subreddited (is there a reddit equivalent of a tweet?) at halftime, his long-view take became more right than mine as the game went on. What I want to kick around below is why that happened.

Before digging into that, a couple things bear noting. First, for as little as they did in the first half, DC did create two sparklingly clear chances – the first a free header by Cristian Dajome from the outer chack of the six-yard box (which prompted a positively adorable, “I forgive you” hug by Maxime Crepeau to Zac McGraw), the other a shoo-in tap-in for Jared Stroud rediected by a timely toe-poke by Eric Miller. Those slips aside, and with a nod to the halftime stats, I did feel good about where Portland was at halftime. So I sub-redditted about it…

Those good vibez carried into the second half when…enough of the same things continued. And I felt like the Timbers had pocketed all three points when Moreno capped off a set-piece scrum (i.e., typically the bane of the home team) by slotting home Portland’s second goal of the night. All the Timbers had to do from there was withstand that grabastic freneticism of DC’s attack – something I felt good about them doing, based specifically on the way they’d managed the first half. I flagged the slips, but Portland’s defense hadn’t given DC much besides. At one very special moment, Zac McGraw cleared three aerial balls in one sequence. Diego Chara seemed to cover the whole of the defensive third and, when the Timbers got on the ball, they seemed to see enough of the North Star to know where they had to go…

…and then all that stopped. The question is why. It’s here that we get to the appetizer for brettcalvin42’s argument. The first goal the Timbers gave up was just plain fucking stupid. The ref (who was…factually, a referee) correctly awarded DC a penalty when the ball hit Chara’s arm (sorry, you have to sit through the full highlights to see it), which he had raised to make an offside call that he did not have the authority to make. (A good first rule of soccer: if you are a player, be a player, not a referee. Mateusz Klich slotted home the PK and, with that, the human element took control of result that AI had declared over, done and in Portland’s favor (a reference to the weird “win-percentage” thing AppleTV introduced to the broadcasts).

The Timbers did, indeed, keep giving the ball away. Over and over and fucking over. Portland made a couple substitutions – David Ayala for Williamsons and Dario Zuparic for Eric Miller – but, as I see it, all that did was remove a player with some capacity to hold the possession high up the field (i.e., Eryk). And yet the Timbers kept playing the same game: forever push the ball forward in hopes of finding another Moreno-esque moment to shatter DC’s press. The Timbers rode that one-trick pony to the end of the game and, to brettcalvin42’s point, without that approach ever looking good for paying off. I lost track of the number of times Asprilla dropped back for a half-hopeful post-up, or that a Timbers player took the ball at his feet and attempted to turn toward goal, only with a DC defender’s knee halfway up his ass. I spent the last 20 minutes of the game psychically begging the Timbers to play just one possession pass (which I said I thought they should do in my preview!) instead of trying to find a path to the winner with every single pass from the 70th minute onward. If I had to guess, I’d say DC caught on to the tactical choice and rendered it farcical.

DC scored their equalizer 10 minutes after scoring their first goal. While you didn’t feel it coming as you watched the game, its inevitability followed from Lloyd Sam casually asking “wow, how is he that open?” like night follows day. The highlights are painful here, but worth watching. Portland had over-committed to an overload up the left, which left DC free to find Pedro Santos on their left; the defense, both meanwhile and inexplicably, had over-committed to defending the Portland’s right, which left Jackson Hopkins in a pasture on Portland’s left(/weakside). From there, all it took for two points to float into oblivion was an Aaron Herrera overlap and a back-post run by Kristian Fletcher to find a tap-in he’ll see only four or five times before he hangs up his boots.

If I had to pin this dloss on anything (I’m using “dloss” as shorthand for a draw that feels like a loss; feel free to workshop it), I’m inclined to point to the stupid shit on the defensive side and, to brettcavlin42’s point, a collective failure to be smarter on the ball. Nothing about this game or the sport of soccer generally commands teams to play a possession game, but the collective failure to play the obvious pass, even if just here and there, fucked them up tonight. When a team presses, making them chase the ball just by (again, as noted in the preview) keeping it moving is a wholly defensible choice both players and coach can make. The number of times I saw the Timbers make the opposite choice – which, here, means forcing low-percentage forward passes, whether to feet or to space, or generally tying to hero the ball up the field…well, it just made me wonder.

Even so, the failure on the defensive side bugs me a little more. It’s not just the stupid mistakes, because those happen – again, think how rock-on-which-I’ll-build-my-church solid McGraw was through the first half, and yet how badly did he lose Dajome on that free header? – so much as the complete unravelling at the end of the game. That’s doubly-irritating when you see how well Portland stymied DC in that low-block ‘ n’ counter through the second half of the first half. A part of me feels like, if they’d committed to that, to actually making DC break them down, they might have produced enough thicket to prevent DC’s second goal. I think they tried to have the best of both worlds, basically, and lost as many points as a result. What I think I’m saying is that the bunker-‘n’-counter can only work when you actually bunker. DC’s second goal looked an awful lot like what happens when you don’t.

I had a couple talking points – fun ones too, stuff about my favorite subject, the midfield – but most of those came to me when I thought I had a win to praise. The bad result killed them, in other words. All in all, it seems like the Timbers need to nail down some fundamentals before kicking around the exotic makes any real sense.

 

[UPDATE: I just found the paraphrase below on a reddit post that clocked the post-game presser and now I'm kicking myself because all of the above could have been replaced with it:

 

"Phil says that DC wanted to create chaos, and Timbers players allowed themselves to get dragged into playing a way that they didn't want to play."]

Till the next one…