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.

Real! (On a better timeline!)

Of the three goals St. Louis scored last Friday, the only one that gave me heartburn was the game-winner. It was their best and cleanest of the night, without question, but it was also the only one made possible by a clear tactical slip-up – i.e., Marcel Hartel dipping into the vertical space between the Timbers’ tragically split defensive lines. The other two goals St. Louis scored – the ball finding Cedric Teuchert at damn-near the same spot Hartel scored from after grazing Bravo's hair and Simon Becher’s wrong-side-of-the-boot clip to the back post - relied on the kind of luck that makes their game-plan work…well, when it works. Nine times out of ten, neither of those go in and, if you throw in Rodriguez scoring his miss (pretty likely!) and Evander limping off (shitty!), Timbers fans would be toasting their drinks instead of crying in them. St. Louis hasn't had that kind of luck much for them in 2024, but it worked for them last Friday and any of the teams still above St. Louis in the Western Conference standings (remember those?) would do well to keep an eye on how often the recent additions to their squad make those happen.

Without dodging the cold, hard reality that the Timbers do not, in fact, play well on the road (3-7-3 says no!) and defend poorly (I think they’re tied for 9th worst for goals allowed), this paragraph from the June 8th loss at St. Louis still (somehow) holds (for me):

“And yet, even if this arguably counts as the Timbers least impressive attacking performance of 2024, it might count as something just as important: one of their more coherent playing performances. Unlike countless prior outings...Portland players looked generally connected and less like total strangers than they have across multiple halves of multiple games this season. Given how rare (more or less) wire-to-wire competence has been this season, I see that as something to celebrate.”

That's a goal, not a rabbit, and less sketchy.

Here, I want to loop back to Evander’s exit from the game, because this piece strikes me as the most important one: I don’t believe Evander would have changed the overall dynamic of the game – i.e., the way he plays, generally, wouldn’t have kept St. Louis from disrupting Portland’s passing out of the back (and full credit to the various subreddits for elevating that problem) – but his biggest upside comes, not with pacing the game, but with yanking that little piece of magic out of his ass that ends with a goal. It could be a precise assist or it could be a big moment: that’s the thing the Timbers need to replace between today and the day he gets back onto the field…which, ideally, will be Portland’s next game. And, full disclosure, I'm only gonna google so long to find that answer before cursing the front office for simply failing to talk about it.

On the happier side of things, how nice was it to see David Ayala step on at the 12th minute and gut through the rest of the game? Here’s to hoping both he and that keep going. Now, some very brief, open-ended questions:

1) Filling the Void
How well did the Santiago Moreno/Mosquera right side back-fill the loss of Evander’s creative audacity? And can that carry the Timbers until Evander returns?

2) Was it luck or was it St. Louis?
To be clear, this whole damn question goes back to St. Louis. They’ve played some pitiable soccer over the 2024 season, dropping two points or all three by a factor of (roughly) 2.5 (i.e., their current record in league play is 4-10-11…that’s decent math, right?). Since the arrival of their new guys (Hartel, Teuchert and Simon Becher) and the commencement of Leagues Cup, they’ve gone 2-0-1 and....hold on, that's 2-1-1 now that Club America booted them out of the tourney (ha, ha, ha!). Still, that's the storied Club America and if things have turned around for…whatever people are calling them now (think I saw “the Raviolis” somewhere), all I can say is thank gods they’re 13 points below the Timbers in the standings. Very much related…

3) Timing and Opposition Matters, Jointly and Separately
I’m happy as the next Timbers fan about the local team’s revival in all competitions, but it feels wise to keep not just which teams they play and where front of mind, but also how those teams are faring at the time. For reference, Portland reanimated their 2024 season by way of the following: home wins against the San Jose Earthquakes, Sporting Kansas City, the Vancouver Whitecaps, Minnesota United FC, Nashville SC, and Real Salt Lake, and road wins at Austin FC and, again, San Jose. Some of those results were genuinely impressive – e.g., RSL, obviously (or if at the time, because they’re struggling) and Vancouver – but there’s enough soft underbelly in there to put real questions to how high the Timbers can rise against Major League Soccer’s “real teams.” If nothing else, everyone beats San Jose (including Los Angeles, tonight, and very, very badly!) and meeting Minnesota and Nashville at the beginning of their respective national nightmares.

That’s pretty much where I want to end this post, even if it’s not where I’d like to end future posts. I’d originally intended to bulk up this post with notes on some other results around the Leagues Cup, but due to this (feeling like a carcass Saturday morning) and that (just plain losing track of the Leagues Cup schedule, i.e., failing to realize when the Round of 32 ended and the Round of 16 started), about 75% of the content I had went stale during the time I sat on this post. To give the short version: I suddenly don’t like the chances of the Timbers catching both Seattle and Colorado (who do did not look like the team Portland thrashed in the Leagues Cup over their next two games), but hold out some hope they might gain some meaningful ground on either Vancouver or Houston Dynamo FC – and I use the word “useful” because I don’t see them closing the eight-gap they’d need to catch RSL.

The two things I’d like to take out of all the above are the following:

1) The Timbers have genuinely improved, as a team, since the start of 2024, if only to the extent that I feel good about them making the 2024 playoffs – which is to say they aren’t, y’know, fucking terrible; and

2) They have very real work to do, particularly and obviously in defense, if they want to take one step after their first one into the 2024 playoffs. If they don’t, I don’t know how to like their chances with anything but a hope that doesn’t border on expecting to see Santa Claus drop out of my chimney on Christmas morn’.

Till the next one, which, gods willing, will include still more sweet, sweet context.