Los Angeles FC 3-2 Portland Timbers: A Long Journey to Nowhere and No Points

Up next, an endless lecture on wormholes...

Well, if that game didn’t barf up talking points like a frat boy sailing three sheets into the wind…

The answer to the question where to begin starts at the end of the first half with the Portland Timbers crawling into an 0-2 hole right ahead of the whistle. The entire half had…more or less sucked, but the Timbers had held on to where the optimistic sort could see them keeping things goal-less and having time to reorganize – particularly on the right side of defense where Juan David Mosquera faced acres of space to manage and a rampant Denis Bouanga to contain. Very much related, Los Angeles FC scored its first goal on the dozenth-plus time Bouanga got loose over there and cut a lethal ball across the area that slid well beyond the tips of Maxime Crepeau’s otherwise excellent fingers. When Portland’s Kamal Miller slid to meet it, he hedged the angle a couple dozen degrees inside and that put LAFC 1-0 up.

There’s nothing to do after that, of course, but to have all concerned dust themselves off, clear their heads and limit any further damage. Yeah, no, that didn’t happen. And I’m going to make a point here that will no doubt get me down-voted to oblivion on Reddit, but I’ll die on this hill: on the one hand, nearly all of LAFC’s most threatening approaches came from Mosquera’s side; on the other, that was always going to happen and what is the rest of the defense/team for if it isn’t to put out the fires he starts?

As anyone who read the scouting report below knows, I was bullish Portland’s chances in this game, if with terms and conditions. One big one: locking down the space where God, all the angels and everyone else knew they’d attack – i.e., through Denis Bouanga and at the right side of the Timbers defense. So, sure, Mosquera made two games’ worth of gaffes last night, but LAFC does not go into the locker room up 2-0 at halftime if just one other field player comes within a country mile of Timothy Tillman trotting up the middle of the field. With no one but an equally-exposed Crepeau to stop him, Tillman slotted home (only available in the full highlights, apparently) and that’s how Portland wound up in that deep hole. 

The final whistle blew on a 2-3 road loss for the Timbers, their (fer crissakes) seventh game(!) with one or fewer points – and, relevant to the overall situation, they’ve picked up zero points out of the balance of those games and just three (fucking) points from the last 21 on offer. And where can that leave a team but riding shotgun with the dregs of the league.

But, wait! There’s more! So much more! Not all of it good, but – hey! – some of it is!
Back in my days on twitter, a certain kind of Timbers fan passed around a brilliant acronym, IKNAS – i.e., I Know Nothing About Soccer – and if that doesn’t feel like acceptance of interventions from the Soccer Gods, I don’t know what it is. Here, it speaks to how the Timbers got all the way back into the game and whether they made that happen, or whether LAFC slipped into a lower gear and allowed them to. How much did subbing Eric Miller in for Mosquera have to do with it? Did LAFC choose to the start the second half by prioritizing defending their lead or did the Timbers make adjustments that helped them find the beginnings of momentum?

Those questions may or may not have answers, but the one true thing I know is this: Crepeau lived up to his preseason hype by keeping the Timbers in this game. Claudio Bravo gets the silver medal there, if only because he had the more spectacular interventions, and Miguel Araujo and Kamal Miller made their stands, but Crepeau excelled as the last line of defense last night. And that’s all it took to leave the requisite opening that Portland came so very fucking close to prying wide open. 

Evander, in excelsis Deo!

He needed to be, given Portland’s league-pacing lousy defense, but LAFC’s has given them a run for their money – and you saw that on both goals Portland scored. Failure to even half-competently clear a corner? Check! A stupid, half-balanced clearance that leads to catastrophe? Say, don’t I know you from somewhere?

I don’t want to lean all the way into “Portland got lucky,” not just because they found their way back into a game, but because they actually played better. I expect to hear a loud, extended chorus about how baffled Portland looked without Evander, but I’d like to suggest an alternate theory – i.e., talking about how much Portland missed Evander lets every player who started last night off the hook. The Timbers couldn’t connect fer shit inside LAFC’s half and that by and large spared the hosts from defending at all over the opening 45. Jonathan Rodriguez found some space, not to mention a damn fine crack at goal, hanging wide on the back post (of which, noted), but the plan that hatched it took nearly 40 minutes to come together…hence the sense of doom when LAFC went up 2-0. Fortunately, the Timbers have been nothing if not resilient in 2024.

Portland saw more of the ball from the jump in the second half – crucially, in the middle of the field where, I believed going in and still believe they’re stronger than LAFC. Eryk Williamson found pockets behind the host’s first line of engagement (in one killer moment, he did this thing where he feinted like he was going to play to the right only to cut the ball to Felipe Mora at the top of the 18). That counter-pressured LAFC more than it created chances, sure, but pressure works against fragile teams and, frankly, I put LAFC in that column right now. Portland’s worse, no question, but how little consolation would that have given LAFC’s fans after watching them fail both individually and collectively on Rodriguez’s goal and after seeing a bad decision from the last man I’d expect to make it (Maxime Chanot) on Santiago Moreno’s?

That got the game to 2-2, and with a gentle wind at Portland’s back. So, what finally and fatally went wrong? I held onto vague hope that the Timbers had rattled LAFC enough to pull off the win during the tiny window between Moreno’s equalizer and Chara’s (very stupid*) sending off. (* To get this out of the way: Chara’s first foul was inexcusable, a foot put very badly wrong by a 38-year-old miracle who had made at least two of the Top 5 Defensive Plays in the game to that point. As for the second…that’s why you don’t get the first one. Dammit.) The game turned after that, not quite to the inevitable, but to where the Timbers had to be perfect. And who did they leave open – again – at the decisive moment.

For all the defeatism stitched into the above, the Timbers came close. Worse, seeing Bouanga’s winner bite at the heels of yet another great Maxime Crepeau save feels like an actual insult to a performance that deserved the draw. There are all kinds of problems with “deserving a draw,” particularly with the Timbers wandering the winless wastes, but one point always beats zero.

Talking Points
1) Two Things LAFC’s Attack Did Well
They played grasscutters behind Portland’s defense, for one, and on the well-proven theory they beat it for speed, but they teed up just as many easy opportunities by shifting Portland to their left, thereby leaving Bouanga (and even Ryan Hollingshead) in miles of prime acreage on Portland’s right. Well-justified complaints about Mosquera’s defending aside, the Timbers’ defensive shape left that space open all night and the entry pass that found it uncontested. That isolated Mosquera, got the ball behind Antony, etc. etc. It took Neville & Co., until the second half to sort that out.

1b) Serious question, is the Timbers backline too slow? If so, how does Neville compensate for that?

1c) The Second Thing LAFC’s Attack Did Well
They played around the place where I thought – and still think – the Timbers have the advantage: central midfield. That not only took the game away from Chara and Williamson, it pulled them wide for cover and opened space for late runners. All those easy plays up LAFC’s left also got the ball deep enough that it flattened out the Timbers’ vertical space. That matters less against a team that’s not adept at attacking that space, but LAFC/Bouanga had a fucking field day with it.

General concern over prancing about...

2) How That Second Detail Has Me Worried
Portland’s midfielders drop too deep into the defense when Portland’s bunkering. That positioning leaves them miles from challenging for balls that fall outside of the 18, for one, but it also leaves opposing midfielders free to set up camp around Portland’s area and keep firing passes into the heart of the defense and the channels around it. Tillman playing the best game I’ve ever seen him play (he was my MotM for both teams) made that sting a little more, but, no sir, I don’t like it. So, this is me advocating for a more aggressive defensive posture for the seventh or eighth time this season. It doesn’t have to reach into the opponent’s half, but it can. In my mind, a team should draw some line or other on the field, one that defines where they straight-up own the ball and bend the game to their will until they make it so. The Timbers need to draw this line.

3) Moreno as a Playmaker?
The goal aside, I’m calling it a bust. Once Evander dropped out, I don’t know why Neville didn’t go with Williamson as his best approximation of a No. 10. I’ve come…let’s call it 70% of the way around to seeing Moreno as a bona-fide starter for a Cup competitive team, but that’s not his role. Williamson simply looks more at home in central spaces and, as necessary, coming back to find the ball. Overlooking him to shoehorn Moreno into that position felt like a powerful case of over-thinking it. And yet it follows from what is becoming my biggest gripe about the Timbers.

4) Like Dancing Before Syncopation
I’ve never seen a team outright resist playing the simple, obvious pass like the Timbers have for a minute or three. – and, to be clear, this argument holds even when Evander is on the field (the man’s a soloist at heart). It is good and wise to do this for any number of reasons – among them, letting the ball do the work, keeping defenders chasing, making it hard to get to players for the momentum-killing fouls LAFC dishes out – but another is to get players loose and involved with passes that let them get on the ball with their head up. That doesn’t always happen for the first player receiving the ball, but the odds get better when the team can keep it moving and…wait for it, get into a fucking rhythm. The Timbers seem permanently addicted to the run-‘n’-gun, forever forward-looking pattern of play and maybe that habit follows from years of relying on transition. So, another request from me: knock it around a little more, fellas.

5) Jonathan Rodriguez, An Assessment Circa Game 10
I don’t think Neville has figured out how to play through Rodriguez, but Portland did their best job to date of playing to him last night. I don’t know whether the former will come, but he did pretty well when isolated against Sergi Palencia. Seeing him place two high-potential chances on frame also did the soul good. There’s plenty of room for improvement, but last night made it easier to see how Rodriguez helps Portland get there.

Well, that went on. I went deeper on the blow-by-blow of the game than I usually do and blame some of that on going too long on a late night, while the rest goes to an unwillingness to make the necessary ruthless cuts to the text. Till the next preview…maybe…