After a season of reducing the Colorado Rapids to a wholly-owned subsidiary of their very own, the Portland Timbers finally lost a game to the Rapids when it mattered most. The 2-1 final score hints at the respectably tight final outcome, but I doubt even one Timbers fan cares, what with Portland at the bottom of a deeper hole, seven teams above them, Minnesota United FC breathing down their necks and the already playoff-bound Los Angeles Galaxy coming to call on Wednesday…
…run-on sentences suggest urgency.
The Basics
What could have been, you know? Had Jonathan Rodriguez buried that first-minute breakaway, had the offside flag not gone up, if pigs could fly and sing “Hurdy Gurdy Man” as they whisked around the sky, maybe Portland gets that early goal and tees up an early Timbers lead. That’s how every meeting between these two teams have played out in their two games in 2024 and, oh, how that has fucked over Colorado at a 4:1 ratio. The early goal fell on the Rapids’ side of the ledger instead – more on that goal later - which left Portland chasing them for a change. It took just 10 minutes for the Timbers to catch them, and on a far better goal, and the game settled into a back-and-forth duel with decent chances falling on both sides.
Portland's best chances fell to Antony, Colorado's to Rafael Navarro: anyone familiar with either team can tell you how that panned out…I kid, I kid. Frustrated as he made anyone with green and gold in their veins, I won’t shit on Antony too hard – more on that later, too. When the goal came, it turned less on something special from Navarro than on Portland’s and/or Juan David Mosquera’s catastrophic failure to mark a player of his (demonstrated) quality on a set-piece.
If memory serves (and so long as the highlights didn’t lie), the Timbers/Antony took all their best shots before Colorado scored theirs, which meant the game just kinda petered between there and the final whistle.
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| C'mon! You know the words! |
I didn’t have hi-IGH hopes going in, so seeing the Timbers check out of Commerce City empty-handed didn’t surprise me all that much. Colorado have arguably built their record/reputation by piling on some of the Western Conference’s weaker teams in 2024, but the Rapids have also beaten their share of big names – e.g., Los Angeles FC, they’ve had the better of Real Salt Lake’s number all season, and, when it comes to making their own good fortune, they've done as much as any team to damage to (say) FC Dallas' 2024 . When your local team does a number on another one, getting caught up in the idea this amounts to a permanent state of affairs comes easy – see, for instance, the Timbers live rent-free in the Seattle Sounders’ heads (bet Brian Schmetzer can’t sleep the night before they play Portland) – but between Colorado’s overall form and playing at Colorado, Portland’s good fortune had a better chance of running out than not last Saturday, and so it did. That's your cue, Mr. Jagger.
The question is what, if anything, they can do about it – especially between now and Wednesday’s game versus the LA Galaxy. I don’t have a firm answer to that question – hell, I’m not even sure I have a good one besides letting Jesus take the wheel – but I do have some talking points to walk through for the loss at Colorado. In the order I noted them…
Talking Points, For Both Teams (Because I’m Leaning into the Global Concept)
1) A Good Find (for the Wrong Team!)
Colorado’s Jackson Travis (left back, 20 years old) looks like a real find. Don’t think he’s displacing Sam Vines anytime soon, but the spot looks in safe hands if it comes to it.
2) The Road Is Lo-ooh-ong!
For all the moments Antony has had this season, the young Brazilian clearly has work to do. That said, and I want to be clear on this, even the best players flub glorious set-ups and piss away clear opportunities all the damn time in this game – i.e., there’s a reason you lose your goddamn mind every time a goal gets scored. I’m less worried about Antony’s oft-heavy touches and what I see in his decision-making than I am about the way he blew two great, golden, gilded opportunities (the miss at the 47th hurt more for me than the breakaway, fwiw). It’ll come or it won’t; that’s just how soccer works. The burning question with Antony is how to balance his development against the team’s need to pick up points. That’s for Phil Neville to work out, obviously, but, for the record, I’ve been quietly pissed at the Timbers subreddit for covering my two topics before I got around to posting them.
3) A Revival?
As noted in the preview I posted too early, Lalas Abubakar has been in the wilderness for as long as he’s been in Colorado. Since replacing the departed Moise Bombito in the Rapids’ staring XI, Abubakar has looked more like his old self. If that’s the case – again, time will tell – that feels like another step in what looks more like the rehabilitation of Chris Armas’ coaching reputation with each passing week.
4) Another Indicator?
If memory serves – and, who knows? YOLO! etc. – the Rapids tried to play through Cole Bassett a fair amount last season and…well, it didn’t work. What does seem to work: playing him deeper, as something closer to a No. 8 in the 4-2-3-1 the Rapids played on Saturday. As much as the entire set-up – e.g., Bassett and Connor Ronan starting as defensive midfield – strikes me as fragile, they get the ball forward quite effectively, they’ve got decent depth (Oliver Llaraz), and the Rapids are wholly competitive so far, so…
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| Just hand the house your money... |
Frustrating as I found the first goal the Timbers allowed, their first one pissed me off a lot less than the second. That’s not to say the first didn’t have real issues – e.g., the first ball in was too easy, Colorado had at least three players connected to one another in the heart of Zone 14, and Portland’s midfielders got caught chasing the play – but the follow-the-bouncing-ball bullshit that allowed the goal to happen? That’s a 9-in-10 event. At most. I, like you, was far, far more freaked out by Portland’s total fail on the Rapids’ second.
5a) Maybe Don’t Have JDM Mark the Opposition's Star Forward?
Res ipso loquitur and just a thought for Wednesday.
6) The Critical Off-Night
The one thing I didn’t see in the post-game chatter that I expected to – and this looms large for me – Evander had a bad one. He wasn’t alone – Rodriguez struggled to get going, and Santiago Moreno didn’t rise to the competitive heights he has in recent weeks – and I understand that some of that follows from Phil Neville not being able to start all of his preferred players in the preferred places, but, when the Timbers need something special, Evander is and always has been the player most likely to deliver. From where I sat (at home, on a couch a cat has peed on far, far too often), Evander forced the issue more often than he needed to and generally didn’t play to his own level.
7) Toying with Toye
This was other talking point the Timbers subreddit stole from me, but I spent a fair chunk of Mason Toye’s time on the field wanting to see him get more time on the field. I’m not talking in terms of taking the Timbers best options – i.e., Rodriguez on the left and Felipe Mora up top – off the field, but I really would like to see Neville sub him in earlier and give Toye a little more time to get in sync with his still-new teammates in, pardon the phrasing, live-fire situations.
That’s it for the game itself. As much as I’d like to get into the (deteriorating) situation at large(! ALARM! ALARM!), this is a short week and I’ll have a wider gap between September 21st and September 28th to reset the state of play across MLS.
The current plan is to have a preview post for the LA game go up on the Timbers subreddit tomorrow night, followed by shorter notes after whatever happens when the Galaxy come to town on Wednesday. Till then…
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