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| It's coming for you... |
To get one major talking point out of the way, of course, you can’t excuse the…fuck me, what? 11 goals given up by the Portland Timbers over the past four games - and that includes tonight’s 2-1 win over the Seattle Sounders in Seattle.Going the other way, if there was ever a better occasion for pitching a stoutly shaky, yet ultimately winning performance, it doesn’t get better than stealing three points out of CenturyLink Field…
The game states went wild tonight, like they got boosted by the lunar cycle or something. When Seattle got the upper hand, they spun Portland’s defense dizzy, too often leaving it to the last man or two to keep the next three goals going in. That was the end of the first half, but the same thing played out through a strenuous 20-minute period in the second half, say, minutes 50-70, only with Portland having the upper hand. I won't dwell on it overly, but you don’t see teams swap periods of dominance like that often and it was…just really fun.
In an odd twist, the first two goals in this game came before all that happened - or at least that’s what happened where I lived, having missed the first 15 minutes and/or Eryk Williamson’s first-ever MLS goal…to think I would have embroidered that had I seen it live. ‘Twas a beauty, though, the way he fielded Seattle’s clearance and turned it into a slicing run, followed by a (fucking srsly?) wall-pass that everyone should have seen coming, but Diego Valeri’s touch…goddamn, I mean, that only looks easy till you watch 50 other dudes fuck up that same touch in 147 different ways. Everything came together in the end, and it was 1-0 Portland, despite Blanco limping off eight minutes earlier.
Because I missed it, I cannot say whether Portland’s goal followed from a spell of pressure; I can only say, and with certainty, that Seattle’s lone goal (also, not bad) came at the front end of their best spell and I’d hold that up as why surviving that became the one and only reason the Portland Timbers survived the night. Seattle players beat every Timbers player to every ball, loose or otherwise, for at least 15 minutes, but Portland, by the grace of Steve Clark, held on.
That said, any comments Seattle fans might have about cosmic injustice can take a long walk into I Don’t Give a Shit Lake, because the Timbers put Stefan Frei and the Sounders through the same blender during the earlier portions of the second half. That held until, piece-by-piece, what was Portland’s one-way traffic toward Seattle’s goal became receding lines of resistance toward Portland’s, which pointed toward an ugly reprise of the end of the first half, but that was only until the simplest of goals by Felipe Mora, which didn’t so much come against the run of play as violate it. And, with that, the Timbers won the game, the Sounders lost it, and who can’t be happy with that?
The game states went wild tonight, like they got boosted by the lunar cycle or something. When Seattle got the upper hand, they spun Portland’s defense dizzy, too often leaving it to the last man or two to keep the next three goals going in. That was the end of the first half, but the same thing played out through a strenuous 20-minute period in the second half, say, minutes 50-70, only with Portland having the upper hand. I won't dwell on it overly, but you don’t see teams swap periods of dominance like that often and it was…just really fun.
In an odd twist, the first two goals in this game came before all that happened - or at least that’s what happened where I lived, having missed the first 15 minutes and/or Eryk Williamson’s first-ever MLS goal…to think I would have embroidered that had I seen it live. ‘Twas a beauty, though, the way he fielded Seattle’s clearance and turned it into a slicing run, followed by a (fucking srsly?) wall-pass that everyone should have seen coming, but Diego Valeri’s touch…goddamn, I mean, that only looks easy till you watch 50 other dudes fuck up that same touch in 147 different ways. Everything came together in the end, and it was 1-0 Portland, despite Blanco limping off eight minutes earlier.
Because I missed it, I cannot say whether Portland’s goal followed from a spell of pressure; I can only say, and with certainty, that Seattle’s lone goal (also, not bad) came at the front end of their best spell and I’d hold that up as why surviving that became the one and only reason the Portland Timbers survived the night. Seattle players beat every Timbers player to every ball, loose or otherwise, for at least 15 minutes, but Portland, by the grace of Steve Clark, held on.
That said, any comments Seattle fans might have about cosmic injustice can take a long walk into I Don’t Give a Shit Lake, because the Timbers put Stefan Frei and the Sounders through the same blender during the earlier portions of the second half. That held until, piece-by-piece, what was Portland’s one-way traffic toward Seattle’s goal became receding lines of resistance toward Portland’s, which pointed toward an ugly reprise of the end of the first half, but that was only until the simplest of goals by Felipe Mora, which didn’t so much come against the run of play as violate it. And, with that, the Timbers won the game, the Sounders lost it, and who can’t be happy with that?
Nobody, I hope, but gods know I won’t try.
