Portland Timbers 1-1 Los Angeles Galaxy: Readings from a Spoiled Sample

This plus a couple geezers. Not great, man.

I saw the question of whether the referee should have awarded the Portland Timbers late in Sunday’s game posed a half dozen times on the Timbers subreddit yesterday and answered with a raging “motherfucker, YES!” It was a massive call to miss, no question – calling advantage on that play does actual violence to the word “advantage” – and, while having two more points wouldn’t have helped Portland in 2024, it would have lifted Portland into the playoffs in 2022, given them homefield advantage for the play-in in 2023.

I get the frustration, in other words, and a very stupid non-call can matter, even in MLS’s largely pointless regular season, but…and you knew this was coming…shouldn’t we all be more concerned with the fact that the Timbers struggled to manage a Los Angeles Galaxy B- team?

About the Game
To start with some positives, seeing Santiago Moreno back in the XI did the soul good – particularly after a couple of his early runs made it look as if he might win the game on his own. The team as a whole looked more comfortable on the ball and decently connected over several periods in the first half, even if all that running and kicking didn’t necessarily translate into anything particularly, or at all, meaningful – i.e., seeing halftime stats like three shots, one on goal for the Timbers, and five (apparently) wayward shots for the Galaxy sounded about right, as did both teams’ piteous xG. Portland even tried to press here and there, which attempt I described in my real-time notes as “looks/works half-ass, but not a total waste.” The fact that came against a veritable “who’s that?” of Galaxy players – e.g., Tucker Lepley, Isaiah Parente, and Harbor Miller (that last one begs the question of what his ancestors did for a living) – always left open the hope that the Timbers were just working out their angles before absolutely destroying the whelps. And, when Felipe Mora deflected a David Da Costa grass-cutter cross from Portland’s right to score Portland's one and only goal, that plan seemed in motion – and with a bonus of giving Timbers fans a glimpse of how Da Costa’s skill set could help the mission. That bright shiny feeling that lasted only until the second half turned into a stalemated slog. I had a sense that LA got the better of the game while the Timbers sucked back into defense as I watched, but still appreciate the confirmation from the official stats page. It’s possible Gabriel Pec hoisted too much weight onto his own shoulders – more below – but he created at least one goal-line scramble and the Galaxy fired some better shots from range between the 60th and 70th minutes. The Timbers defense held…firm-esque through all that pressure, which only made LA's equalizer, from a simple ball over the top to Christian Ramirez (wake up, Zac), more simmeringly infuriating. I just circled back to the highlights, which helpfully reminded me that the Timbers had a couple chances to get back in the lead, and that brings the game and summary back to the non-call on the penalty that started the post.

MLS Weakly, January 21, 2023: A Scrabble Bag, Honestly, Weaklier Than Usual

Vox Media's HR department.

I saw something late last week about a tech company that had their people show up to work and attempt to gain entry with their keycards. If an employee saw green, in they went...with a momentary reprieve, but if they saw red...

Red light, green light. Where have I heard that before?

I don’t mean to make light of the layoffs that appear to have wiped out what’s left of Major League Soccer coverage on SB Nation. I do, however, know that I’ve relied on SB Nation’s devoted team sites for years – particularly in preseason, when I’m sniffing around for hype on a player I don’t recognize. Some of those sites were better than others – bluntly, a couple employed stenographers instead of writers – but I’ll miss them all. And whatever I thought of any given writer, that’s a person now looking for work and that sucks.

Losing Stumptown Footy hits closest to home, obviously. The Portland market has always had a decent stable of writers and, more recently podcasters, but Stumptown made the local scene feel a little bigger and more stable. They had some good people to boot. Anyhoo, Vox Media can go to heck. Yearning for the days when people ran local media, and many other things, as a community concern. If I win the lottery. Or invent something...I listed each in the order they’re likely to happen...

The past week also saw the tragic, savagely unlucky death of Charlotte FC’s Anton Walkes. My oldest child turns 25 this year, which drives home the the agony of Walkes' parents. My heart goes out to his friends and teammates as well.

That’s it for the week’s tragedies, thank gods...

Last week was a slow fucker outside all that. (How slow was it?) The MLS Kickoff letter posted power rankings so premature that I couldn’t see the point in the reading – or the writing for that matter. [Ed. - Totally unrelated, but the soap dispenser next to one of the sinks at the bowling alley literally prematurely ejaculated. It went off when the water turned on and could not perform when the time came.] In fact, this little nugget from the second of Matt Doyle’s mailbag posts (again, the scrounging is universal) might have been the most interesting soccer-related thing I read all week:

Portland Timbers 1-2 Seattle Sounders: When Your Tifo Game Is Your Last, Best Hope

Our shared lives....

After taking in the (condensed) Hell of the Portland Timbers’ midweek loss to Minnesota United FC, and then enduring the auto-erotic asphyxiation gone wrong that Portland coughing up a late 2-2 draw to the Seattle Sounders, a moment that made a mockery of a truly wonderful tifo, I have several things to say/note, or that make me wanna go fetal…

First, see the title.

Second, I want to bury this idea about “bad defending,” because I view that as a too-broad argument for a more specific phenomenon. Generally speaking, the Timbers don’t defend badly as a unit, so much as they keep making horrific, this-will-make-your-mother-hate-you mistakes in defense, and, because they follow from bad decisions in the precise/specific/defining moment, those kinds of fuck ups are harder to remedy. There, I’m talking about Jeff Attinella coming off his line on Minnesota’s third goal and taking out not one, but two defenders, or the way not one single player in Portland’s defense tracked Clint “Fucking” Dempsey wandering into the space that opened up when all three of Portland’s last-line defenders dropped off on Seattle’s equalizer…the line was immaculate, then, if distinctly Maginot in nature and quality. Basically, the problems seem based less on structure than bad decisions by individual players.

I’m not saying Portland’s defense doesn’t blow the fundamentals from time to time – see the pocket that Christian Ramirez settles in to score Minnesota’s second goal (yes, keeping a good line is fundamental) – but everyone’s in some reasonable approximation of where they should be for Minnesota’s first (Okugo just got a bad touch, and the resulting own-goal; then again, where’s the reaction to that overload?). The same goes for Joevin Jones’ opening goal on Sunday: Portland’s defenders were in decent position – and I’m not saying that a couple player didn’t react like corpses (looking at you, Alvas Powell, Lawrence Olum) – but, honestly, Jake Gleeson’s rebound went straight back into the natural progession of Jones' run, who didn’t so much follow up as found the ball rolling lazily into his stride, and that’s just the gods tickling the odds in one direction or the other. As suits their fancy, the whimsical bastards…

Bottom Line: set aside the details and Timbers fans get the same outcome: every Timbers game now amounts to an exercise in anxiously turning the crank on a Jack-in-the-Box and waiting for that fucker to pop and scare the shit out of you/ruin your day.