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.

Another symbol.

5) A Symbol
What was this game but the Portland Timbers' season in microcosm – i.e., a crack offense undone by a cracked defense?

Parts of one criteria bleeds into one, even two, of the others in the above, of course, but No. 5 goes a long way to explaining why No. 1 keeps happening, no?

Maybe deconstructing the game wasn’t the place to start. Let me back up with…

A Narrative
St. Louis came out stronger, which means they didn’t quite stun Portland with the early lead (Becher’s, 11th minute), but Araujo’s meddlesome tackle (on the same player, 36th minute) and the ensuing penalty put them in a very real hole. If there’s a “what could have been” lurking in this result, I'd point to that: it took the Timbers 30 minutes to run out of their collective fog and swarming, adopted Midwesterners to organize their first concerted push toward goal and then – pow! – Araujo undoes that budding progress with just one stupid, try-hard tackle. Portland pulled it all together to score the first goal just three minutes later (link above), but then the defense, writ large, lost another mark on a set piece a few minutes later and, again, they’re back to two goals down and walking into the halftime locker room down 1-3.

For all the good moments Portland got out of Mora and Rodriguez, I don’t think I'm stiffing them by crediting Evander for bringing the game back from the brink. The man put his stamp on all four of Portland’s goals, directly once and just one degree removed twice (i.e., he assisted, which is not just legal, but approved in all 50 states), and that just speaks to the most elevated example in what I’m talking about in No. 4 above. Because the Timbers struggled to do anything well collectively tonight, they relied on individual players doing really good things, or they couldn't do anything at all. That took the form of, not just Evander’s decisive execution, but also Moreno turning out of the first wave pressure to get through the first stage of ball progression, even if the next thing he did ended in a dead end (maybe get better about getting rid of the ball?); it took the form of Rodriguez cutting inside from the left to stress the right side of St. Louis’ defense and/or open space for Claudio Bravo to get around the outside. It felt like each of them had to play through three St. Louis players to get anything done, at least until the 80th minute or so, but that grunt work paid off and ultimately let Portland tie the game.

To look on the bright side, the sum of those individual efforts turned into the half-conscious collective weight that overwhelmed St. Louis and kept them from their first road win of 2024. Here I thought they were supposed to be the spoilers tonight…

Has Ridgewell tried this?

Unfortunately, the Timbers can’t afford to ignore the dark side of the equation – e.g., they have to grapple with the reality that Thorisson restored St. Louis two-goal lead one literal minute after the Timbers dragged themselves back to 2-3, when Bravo launched a half-desperate cross to the back-post that (who else?) Evander bounced back to Mora for a tap-in. They have to take the wrestle with the fact they allowed four goals in a home game, drag that fact to the ground, stuff dirty socks in its mouth (why not?), and see that it never happens again. If there’s a through-line laced into all of the above, it goes something like this:

The Timbers can score goals at will – and, just to note it, they currently have the 2nd highest numbers of goals scored behind Messiami (aka, Inter Miami CF) – but there’s one thing they can’t do: control a game. Every Timbers fan sees the shakiness of Portland’s defense, but how much of that follows from an upstream effect from the Timbers’ collective inability to do all the little things a good team needs to if they want to keep a handle on the ball whether its coming from them, or rolling back at them?  Bottom line, the Timbers have only one effective mode and it's running headlong straight at the other team until they break through. This works better against some teams (e.g., Colorado), but it hasn't worked so well in recent weeks (i.e., against St. Louis), or against the better, more self-possessed teams in MLS.

It’s almost impossible to watch the Timbers without wondering where the catastrophic mistake will come from and what the timing will mean for the broader cause. That damned nagging sensation isn’t always there – I think you can feel its absence, honestly – but I’d say that shows up in 70%, maybe even 80% of the time. To anyone up for a troubling thought exercise, try to remember the last time when watching and waiting for the next cursed shoe to drop wasn't a fundamental part of watching your Portland Timbers play soccer and let me know where you land. For me, it was the MLS Is Back Tournament.

I have one more thing to note, something positive: when was the last time you had this much fun watching the Timbers play? They're capacity to do unto other defenses what they allow to be done to their own and the poor besieged bastard who starts in goal is a marvel. Sure, the lost points sting and every game feels like a coin-toss, in every meaning of the word, but there's also a lot of joy in a little improv. Till the next one....and it's gonna be a weird week, btw.