Portland Timbers 4-4 St. Louis CITY FC: To the Spoilers Go the Spoils

Tough one at the office today...

I can identify five criteria by which one can judge the Portland Timbers' 4-4 home draw versus the stain-stubborn St. Louis CITY FC team that came a-callin’ tonight.

1) A Bad Result
Because the Timbers suck on the road – not St. Louis bad, mind you, but pretty shitty – they need to get the best out of every home game. They did not.

2) A Great Response
Portland went down four times in this game – by two goals at one point, in heartbreaking fashion at another – but they kept punching back, firing a truly heroic number of shots and scoring a glorious late, late equalizer nine minutes past death through a deliciously vicious Evander free kick. They did better than never give up.

3) The Deeper Problem: Why That Was Required
With allowances for the truism that every goal your team scores is brilliant, every one they allow an embarrassment, the Timbers defense let in some dogshit goals tonight, and so many of them. I doubt it’s worth ranking them in terms of incompetence (and yet, what the Hell, from the most incompetent to the least: 1) Araujo’s dumb tackle (2nd goal; gotta watch the full highlights; Eduard Lowen PK); 2) Simon Becher unmarked in the box (1st goal); 3) Cedric Teuchert free and naked as the day he was born in Zone 14 (3rd goal); 4) Nokkvi Thorisson's step-inside assassination), because it’s the variety of failures that hurts. That's like Achilles  having four heels, instead of just the one.

4) The Primacy of the Individual
The Timbers executed a marvelous, fluid movement to score their first goal, aka, the one that made it interesting. A move that started with Santiago Moreno catching a stray pass at the center stripe and ended with a tap-in by Jonathan Rodriguez, but the best parts of it passed through Evander and Felipe Mora, who fed Rodriguez with a brainy, perfectly weighted pass to the back post. I’d call that an outlier, because all the other goals a) looked pretty goddamn scrappy and relied on the kind of spontaneous inspiration and technique – mostly through Evander – that’s tough to replicate. That idea – Portland needing something special from someone to make anything happen – was all over this result.

MLS Week 26: (Loose) Notes on the Re-Entry & Laying Down Some Markers

WHAT IS HAPPENING?!? (Japanese game show, btw)

I didn’t watch nearly as much Leagues Cup as I’d wanted to (a single tear rolls fitfully down my cheek as I type) and for reasons I can’t quite put words to. I watched a good share of highlights, did the requisite oohing and awing over the prettier goals, but the sense that what happened there doesn’t translate to Major League Soccer’s regular season in any comprehensible way crept in somewhere around the time my Portland Timbers got a St. Louis shove out of the tournament in the Round of 32.

No small part of that follows from the Leagues Cup format itself. The three-team, two-game group stages makes for a weird/unforgiving format, for one – e.g., the Colorado Rapids and the San Jose Earthquakes qualified for the Round of 32 with 0-1-1 records, while Minnesota United FC and Real Salt Lake failed to qualify on 1-1-0 records – and that the Liga MX teams haven’t really started their season and also play a total of zero games at home gives even the shakiest MLS teams a leg up in one-off games…

…not that that stopped me from poring over the results, clocking who lost to who, and when, and running that against the…possibly eccentric document I created to track results, also it’s not me, I’m not losing my goddamn mind, because the Form Guide doesn't get the damn visuals right.

At any rate, with games of MLS Week…26 now playing on the streaming service that lives in your TV, I wanted to reconnect with where the regular season left off and what, if anything, the Leagues Cup said about where it may go between today and Decision Day. The observations below lean more into trends than details (i.e., no, I didn’t know about that minor knock that may make [Team X’s] your home team’s second stream (high potential!) No. 8 play a little south of his best), and it mostly kicks around loose impressions to be confirmed by later results, aka, the immovable facts that decide the fate of all and sundry. As stated in, I’m just trying to wrap my head around some things to get back in touch with what I’m watching.

This starts with an Eastern Conference overview, but will wrap up on how I’m feeling about the Timbers’ chances after the Leagues Cup. With that, let’s roll…

St. Louis CITY FC 3-1 Portland Timbers: A Loss and the Rest of the Season

Never, ever forget: the pig enjoys it.

I sat on posting this for a number of reasons – everything from still mulling it over to feeling like I didn’t have anything to say beyond, “say, that didn’t go well,” to feeling like a carcass Saturday morning – but the primary reason I took a breath for putting up a post about the Portland Timbers' 1-3 loss at St. Louis CITY (wNbc!) FC was this: I thought they played reasonably well given the givens…

…the secondary reason was a plan to shift to weekly, more context-rich posts (we’ll see how that goes). At any rate…

I took the usual time to tip through the subreddits – e.g., posts about how hard (and deep) Portland sucks on the road, how hard the defense shits the sheets, how everything would have been better had Evander not limped off…let’s go with disturbingly early (no low-hanging updates on that, btw) – and all those arguments and talking points make enough sense. And yet…

“Combative; looks like a foul-free war”

“midfield/middle of field, total melee”

Those rhyming phrases slipped into the notes I took during the game, 60 minutes apart. Between that and re-reading my post from Portland’s goal-less draw at St. Louis earlier this season, this Leagues Cup tilt delivered the game I expected. St. Louis disrupts more than they play, which makes them hell to play through: “forcing turnovers in advantageous places” (aka, pig-wrestling) has made them the MLS team they are today, for good (2023!) or ill (2024! probably!). Sure, Portland struggled to connect passes, but what is that but the whole damn point of that approach?

And, yes, any fan wants to see his/her/their local team play through that – but that’s exactly where I took comfort in the loss. Portland created enough chances to win – they even had two bites at scoring first (e.g., Juan David Mosquera somewhere around the 30th and Jonathan Rodriguez’s how-the-fuck-did-that-guy-miss chance at the back post (has to be in here, right?) – but they didn’t make them count. In defense of anyone ripping his/her/their hair about how few total chances Portland created, the official stats put a very real cap on how hard I can push back on that point, but the Timbers could have ridden Claudio Bravo’s gods-kissed banger to a draw, but for…well, St. Louis doing something like the same.

St. Louis CITY FC/Leagues Cup Scouting Report: A Mirror Into Portland's Past

legend.

Won’t lie. I would have loved to see the Timbers draw FC Juarez. If you haven’t watched the penalty shoot-out for their loss at St. Louis CITY FC, do yourself a solid and watch it. I’ve never seen a ‘keeper do that and it was a delight…

Speaking of Portland’s actual opponent…

In the interest of making these posts more reddit-friendly, and with apologies to people who come to this space for long-form content, I’m reducing Scouting Reports to literally five things I’d tell anyone about St. Louis CITY FC…well, aside from some basics – e.g., they have struggled to actually win all season, even at home, and that they have experienced some heavy turnover of (very late; farewell, Tim Parker, sweet prince). With that out of the way…allons y.

1) A Smarter Press, an Absent Wrecking Ball
St. Louis still defends quite high and leaves a fair amount of (exploitable) vertical space within that shape, but I haven’t seen them run the drunk-octane high-press that served them so well in 2023. The wrecking ball from the subtitle is Joao Klauss, who did as much as any player to make that work. He hasn’t appeared a ton in 2024 and hasn’t even made the bench during this Leagues Cup. At any rate, they have pressing triggers within that high defensive line and release them pretty effectively if a team can’t take them out of it. Related…