San Jose Earthquakes 0-0 Portland Timbers: When a Plan Comes Together...Somewhat

Everything in its place. Step One.

A kind of muddy result overall, if you ask me. The Portland Timbers created an advantage, yet struggled to exploit it; meanwhile, the San Jose Earthquakes have a decent argument that they can survive without some key starters – to be clear, that’s survive, not thrive.

A 0-0 draw by any other name, basically.

To credit a coaching staff that doesn’t often get it, Gio et. al. set up the team smartly, all the forks in the right places, and so on; to keep the credit flowing, they gambled on an approach and it paid off – handsomely, even. Given how much San Jose works up both flanks, playing four at the back made sense and starting Eric Miller, a purer defender than (the admittedly absent) Juan Davis Mosquera, neutralized Cade Cowell – at least until the ‘Quakes had him drop deeper to where he could receive the ball and attack the space in front of Miller. The gamble came with defending San Jose way up to their defensive third and, for what it’s worth, I believe Portland has a team that can do that in a way they haven’t in years. Italics in the word “defending” because I saw Portland collapse space as opposed to hunting the ball. That limited most potential over-committing, a good thing under most circumstances. One thing I want to note about that, both about tonight and going forward...

I rate Judson highly enough that I didn’t expect much falling off on seeing San Jose’s starting roster tonight versus last week's, but the sum of the game begs the question of how much Carlos Gruezo and Jamiro Monteiro make the ‘Quakes tick. A midfield three with those two and Jackson Yueill has plenty of bite, plus some good ideas about how to get forward...which points to a real question about tonight’s li’l joust.

To highlight my biggest takeaway from tonight’s game, and I noted this in tonight’s game thread, the Timbers played the best full-field team defense I’ve seen them play all season. The optimist wants to believe that happened because the Timbers collapsed space with the tidiness of an in-prime K-pop act; the pessimist wonders how different that would have looked with Gruezo and Monteiro on the field: the eternal question of cause and effect lurks somewhere in the middle of all that, therefore I don’t feel like we really got an answer to the question, have the Timbers turned a corner of, gods forfend, actually improved?

USA 0-0 Colombia: Mom, Dad, I Don't Know How I Feel About (January) Camp

Me tonight, only 20 years ago and with a lot more hair.

I was a little torn about the line-up the U.S. trotted out in tonight’s positively somnolent 0-0 draw against Colombia. January camp is, or has become, all about calling in players from the fringe and giving them a moment – I get that - but I would have rather seen interim coach Anthony Hudson name and stick with a starting XI over both games. Instead, he played the camp like a bad hand in draw poker and swapped out 10 players between Wednesday’s loss and tonight; unless I’m miscounting, only Walker Zimmerman started both games (and he lasted longest in this one).

Now, had you presented me with both line-ups and asked me which would do better, I’m pretty sure I would have picked tonight’s line-up, regardless of opponent. If nothing else, it featured the more experienced/accomplished players, particularly with the national team set-up – e.g., Paul Arriola, Aaron Long, Jesus Ferreira, Kellyn Acosta, Sean Johnson – and yet they delivered less in every category I could name outside the spine of the defense.

To state the obvious, Serbia and Colombia are different teams that played different styles. Perhaps knowing they could get something lethal going given the right circumstances, Serbia gave the U.S. more of the ball while Colombia played its defense high enough to force errors and broke from there; call it a second cousin to a press, twice removed. I don’t know what Wednesday’s line-up would have looked like against Colombia, in other words, and mostly hope that that multiverse got treated to a more entertaining game because, my god, was tonight’s game like watching old people fuck in front of drying paint....you have my apologies for the mental image...

The Mothership’s stats page doesn’t post xG for U.S. games, but the Yanks’ five total shots suggests something in the 0.5 range. The only two shots on goal involved Matthew Hoppe – he set up Paxten Aaronson for one (and he could have done better) and fired from the channel for the other – but those didn’t amount to anything besides easy-ish saves for “A. Montero,” Colombia’s ‘keeper. The only other decent U.S. chance I can recall from my times of full, attentive consciousness was the chance Ferreira opened up with a smart first touch. The way he lost that ball to a swarm of Colombian defenders sums up the game in a singular moment. The Colombians broadly overwhelmed the Americans tonight, but without ever coming close to beating them - i.e., boredom, by any other name.

USA 1-2 Serbia: Their Coach Seating Is Better Than Our Coach Seating

No. How are you really?

How do you talk about something that didn’t matter?

With just a handful of well-known exceptions – e.g., Walker Zimmermann and Aaron Long – just about every player who started for the U.S. Men’s national team tonight are only in the picture if you’re looking at the edges or deep into the background. And, given the comparative youth of the current starting set, providing a novel approach and/or skill-set strikes me as the only way any of tonight’s bubble boys can bounce into the first team. That’s where you start...

The place I want to go from there is a back-to-front TED talk about what worked and what didn’t tonight – and, no less significantly, when. But first the recap.

I don’t know much about the Serbian national team that beat America’s freshest B-Team 2-1, but I have a pretty good idea about how it won the game. Taking advantage of the rift that opened on a lonely free kick in the first half helped (think this is a full highlight package; go nuts to the extent it is), sure, but the game turned at the beginning of the first half. That’s when Serbia started pressing the American back-line and deep-lying midfielders. That pressure didn’t force mistakes, so much as exploit and punish them. A Serbian player ran down every long touch – which had ample company, unlike Serbia’s free kick – and they read every telegraphed past like they were jamming the channel. The winning goal came well before the pressure evaporated – and it followed from chasing a loose touch and a soft, telegraphed pass – and that left it up to the U.S. to claw their way back to level terms.

As in the first half, it took the U.S. a while, maybe even too long, to tilt the field toward the Serbian goal. The Portland Timbers’ Eryk Williamson kicked off the hottest rally of the 2nd half with a flying tackle and a great leading feed to an overlapping DeJuan Jones, a move that forced a save from...hold on, yeah, the lineups are up. Guess it was “D. Rosic” who made that save. I count that as one of the U.S.’s brighter team moves of the evening – it was a lot of soloist stuff prior, with the best of it coming from the San Jose Earthquakes’ Cade Cowell – and, yeah, yeah, yeah, I see those 20 shots, but I doubt I felt all that inspired by a quarter of ‘em, maybe a third...

San Jose Earthquakes 3-2 Portland Timbers: Lost, and Never Found

Won't lie. I wanted to do better with this....

Have you ever seen one of those old movies, or even a parody of one, where a central character whispers a dozen farewells on his/her way to the beyond?

The Portland Timbers gave their best homage to that trope tonight in a slow-fade 2-3 road loss at the San Jose Earthquakes. The foreground the blunt reality, San Jose wanted it more. Their energy was better, they contested the ball faster - or, in far too many cases, at all - and they just, for lack of a better word, competed tonight in a way the Timbers only did either one player or one moment or a time and, yes, the “or” in that clause is 1,000% conscious, deliberate, not a typo, etc.

As documented in two or three places, I expected goals in this game. Moreover, I expected the game to turn on which team scored the most goals - i.e., basic logic meets basic math - and it did. And, finally, I don’t know what happened to the Timbers tonight, I really don’t. Rather than say they gave up…tempting as that is, I feel alright letting them off the hook with, they couldn’t see the path forward, so they tried to walk directly into the trees. Big ones too.

Where to begin with dissecting this one? And is there a point to the project? Hold on. I'll find one or two...

To make up for cavalierly shitting on San Jose’s defense going into this one, I hereby acknowledge that Tommy Thompson, aka, The Goal-Less Wonder, waltzed his way to one step inside the penalty spot before a there-but-for-the-width-of-Bill-Tuiloma’s-boot the Timbers would have gone down 4-2. After a certain point - here, I’m thinking rather pointedly about the ‘Quakes’ second, jail-break-perfect counterattacking goal - everything about the game rhymed with that moment. Even the laws of gravity seemed to tilt against the Timbers from that point forward and, yes, now confirmed, Portland did something less than half of shit over the course of that second half.

I, like a lot of people, have waited patiently for the Timbers to find a rhythm and start doing something with it this season and assumed they would. Even if I didn’t trust it, I hoped that Portland’s 7-2 win over Sporting Kansas City had knocked off the rust…but, no. Moreover, assuming you stick with the implicit premise of my review - i.e., that an early goal invites teams to play toward Portland, which opens up space for their counter - well, the wheels fell all the fucking way off that one tonight. Once San Jose landed on a method to stuff the Timbers transition outlets - related, does anyone think that’s some state secret by now? - the game ended as a contest. For the record, that happened somewhere around the 65th minute. Or the 70th, in the event I want to spare anyone’s blushes.