Minnesota United FC 1-1 Portland Timbers: Balling with the Elite, Running from the Hoi Polloi

Mood. I think, or thereabouts.

Anyone either have a guess, or do any of you wonderful people actually know, the number of points that the Portland Timbers since they just missed out the Leagues Cup semifinals?

The answer is two. Two fucking points out of 12 available. If you take out the two Leagues Cup wins (against Liga MX’s teams cramming for the start of the Clausura), the Timbers have a thin two wins over the past ten (10!) games. Those count as rays of sunshine in an otherwise gloomy 2-5-3 run – by Jove, wasn’t that road win at Los Angeles FC fun? remember that one? wasn’t it ever so fun? – and, in some ways, it was the fucking awful road form that got one to wondering whether the floor had given out, only without all of us doe-eyed believers catching on, a la Wile E. Coyote. Between shutouts at Toronto FC (probably out of the playoffs next weekend) and FC “Almost Certainly Cooked” Dallas (give it time…I kid, I kid), and contributing to an existential threat by being the only team to hand Real Salt Lake a road win over their past 10 games (related, get a load of the opposition in their four recent home wins: v DC, v STL, v HOU, v SJ), fans should be throwing rocks at their TVs and expensive beers at the executive suites. (And, should you ever get a clear line on Merritt Paulson, throw hard, people; throw hard).

And yet, somehow, the Timbers just took the second-best team in the West to within five minutes (with stoppage!) of a loss at home. Things still seem okay!

Minnesota United FC 1-1 Portland Timbers
About the Game, Briefly and Broadly
My notes have this as “chess, with the odd collapse” – by which I (think I) meant, a game mostly contained between the two teams’ back lines with the odd breakthrough. For what it’s worth, the highlights support that take better than the final stats; the latter have me wondering whether I nodded off during the Timbers better moments. Stranger things, etc.

A smarter take – and the Official Xg backs it up a bit (how does one capitalize “xG”?) – holds that both teams came close to a decisive break throughout, only to have the last line of defense snuff out the danger. For (at least) the second week running, all Timbers defenders covered balls through and over the midfield like they’d read and absorbed the job description – again, the Finn Surman/Dario Zuparic feels like the ticket I want to ride until Portland runs outta gas (and Jimer Fory is, like, the best jerrycan they’ve had in seasons; also, yes (SIGH!), hold this thought) – and that kept Minnesota off the board, if with the odd, how-did-he-miss-that(?) moment (thinking Joaquin Pereyra, with most of the the goal at his mercy just after the half). Minnesota created a steady drip of chances throughout – credit to James Pantemis for keeping out his share (PHIL, just choose a guy!) – something that has yielded them (shit!) twelve more points worth of success than the Timbers have managed.

San Diego FC 0-0 Portland Timbers: A Little Satisfaction, a Little Future Trepidation & a Wrap Up of the West

With, like, a lot of shit left out.

This post also counts as my first/second stab at a new format/concept. On the most basic level, it involves: 1) kicking around (or just kicking) the Portland Timbers’ most recent result; 2) a quick tour around the relevant parts of the Western Conference for perspective on the grand scheme; and 3) a quick check-in with the team Portland plays next (the Dread Pirate Minnesota). I’m going to hit this at the highest stream-of-consciousness speed I can manage – about all I can do four days late, but I pledged to drag myself through this, gritted teeth, bad taste and all.

Close readers may have noticed I identified this as a first for a new format and, paraphrasing one of the worst we'll-do-it-in-post moments in the Star Wars universe, that’s true from a certain point of view – specifically, I switched the order after the sections on last Saturday’s game, so that the Scouting Memo (I tightened it up), aka, the only forward-looking portion of the post, comes at the end, which is the opposite of what I did for the FC Cincinnati post. (No need to read that; already forgotten.)

There will actually be a third iteration this weekend, when I post notes on the game and then the other bits later. At any rate…

I just sat through the highlights to reconnect with this game. The first that struck me was the full minute of the 7:30 burned on the VAR review for the Andres Dreyer “goal” called back for offside around the 30th minute. I had a joke in the hopper about that being the only actual event of the game, but the rest of the highlights and the final stats painted a better memory for this game than the World of Imagination in my mind. It was still pretty damn dull, but, hey, little Ws have big hearts.

San Diego FC 0-0 Portland Timbers
About the Game, Briefly and Broadly
Is it possible that Corey Baird, formerly of FC Cincinnati (formerly of Houston Dynamo FC, formerly of LAFC, formerly of Real Salt Lake), coming off was the single most significant event of the game? It’s possible, sure: he played two drop-flicks that sent Dreyer free-‘n’-easy behind Portland’s back line, including the one that teed off Dreyer’s offside shot. The drought only looked more apparent thanks to San Diego’s failure to post even one shot on goal over the second half. They had a couple, just not many. Even so, I wouldn’t have believed MLS’s newest kids put just one shot on goal all game if the stats didn’t swear to it…and, yep, even that one shot on goal followed from the earlier Baird/Dreyer connection. The sum of that feels a tenuous combination of promising (for Portland) and significant (for San Diego), with the emphasis on tenuous.

10 Thoughts I Had While Watching Portland Draw Minnesota

Minnesota, in human form, at home.

I decided to try something new for match reports and for a couple reasons, but I’ll only bore you with the substantive one: going deep on any given game isn’t so different from running an experiment once with a small and hyper-specific dataset. When you get right down to it, it takes string of results to make a dataset that’s worth a damn – and even those have ups and downs to go around. As my Portland Timbers have demonstrated over the past five (1-3-1) to ten (3-4-3) match days…

Portland Timbers 1-1 Minnesota United FC
About the Game, Still More Briefly
Nothing of note happened in the first half, thus endeth that portion of the post.

Overall, though, pretty goddamn dull, in part due to Minnesota’s soul-sucking approach to the game and in part due to the Timbers looking…familiar in all the wrong ways. Against that, I’m glad I re-watched the second half (I was entertaining through the first viewing, or was I merely hosting, because was I all that entertaining?) because, even as the result felt insufficient (in the biggest picture), Portland put on a better show than I remembered.

Both teams posted better final numbers than I would have guessed after sitting through it (1.5 times). Still, Minnesota put the Timbers in the uncomfortable position of using the ball and the discomfort showed. Nodding back to expectations, the Loons scored on a set piece – a reported specialty for them, despite all the headers over the crossbar (for both teams, really) – with Anthony Markanich adding to his unexpected haul for 2025. Between there and the final whistle, Minnesota either slipped up by allowing Juan David Mosquera time and space in the right channel – either that, or they got cocky and thought they could manage it – and they got within mere minutes of getting away with it. Mosquera snapped back with, 1) one of his best attacking performances of the season, 2) a shot off the crossbar that put-near broke it (certainly somewhere in here), and 3) an assist on Omir Fernandez’s tidy equalizer. Couldn’t feel happier Fernandez, that scrappy little scamp.

Out of context, I’d call this result respectable. Minnesota’s a brick shithouse of a team, they’re a ways higher in the Western Conference standings, if not as high as they would have been if they’d held on, and seeing Portland push to the end felt good. The fact the Timbers pulled it off with a gently rotated starting XI made it feel a little better. Add context back into the mix – i.e., the run of results over the past five, ten games, the reasonable argument that good, competitive teams beat good, competitive teams at home – and things feel a little worse.

Orlando City SC 1-0 Portland Timbers: Hitting a Speedbump, Hitting a Speedbump, Hitting a Spee...

A celebration of a great, perhaps useless design.

Neither a lot to get excited about, nor much to fret over. The Portland Timbers traveled to Orlando City SC and lost a slow, sweaty, tired affair 1-0, a result that, for me, differed from expectations by only a goal or two in Orlando’s favor. To be clear, that was my sense going in. Let’s move on to what actually happened.

About the Game
Orlando got on Portland early and Timbers players did their part to pile pressure on themselves with loose giveaways. The weight of it didn’t translate into much more than a few shots from range, with the best falling to (fortunately) left back David Brekalo and (less so), Luis Muriel. Santiago Moreno fired Portland’s best, early-ish shot with a Short Olimpico (i.e., it knuckled to near-post) and Kevin Kelsy crowned their first half attacking effort with a shot that was more wise than good (46th minute, came closer to the top row than Pedro Gallese’s goal mouth). Sadly, those efforts came on either side of Orlando’s one and only goal of the game, scored by Duncan McGuire off a slick Eduard Atuesta slip pass. Portland’s defenders shared the burden of that goal fairly equally – e.g., who’s to blame more between the three-to-four dudes stepping to Atuesta while (the theretofore great) and Jimer Fory and Finn Surman leaving a wide lane for McGuire between them – and that left Portland’s attack the burden of finding the equalizer. Or at least that’s one way this game could have played out…

Per the official stats, Orlando topped the Timbers by 2-to-1 on the basic attacking stats and (somehow) tripled them for xG…but they never looked much like adding a second goal. I just reviewed the full highlights to see whether there was some great chance or moment I forgot, but the Lions never found much better than aspirational over the second half and they didn’t even find that often. Sadly, the Timbers never really found third gear either – David Da Costa might have had their best chance of their seven (that's 7) total on the night, but that amounted to 2/3 a chance, at best. Unfun reminder, that leaves Portland on just 12 shots over their past two games.

To give them some credit, Portland had the better of play over the second 45 minutes. By the 60th minute, Orlando shipped them as many turnovers as the Timbers sent the other way over the opening 30 minutes of the first half. Portland held the ball better, even if they didn’t always know how to get more out of holding onto it, and they managed to pin Orlando into their own half, it a little further from goal. They even had a reasonable shout for a penalty when 2nd-half sub, Ariel Lassiter, got around Brekalo, but the referee waved it away after seeing the tip of the defender’s toenail catch the ball after passing through Lassiter. As with the game, that “missed call” tracked as neither a lot to get excited about, nor much to fret over. I’ll get to the bigger fish to fry after…

Portland Timbers 1-1 Seattle Sounders: It Was the [BLANK] of Times

I think cuffs and collars matched. You?

Just to note it, these posts should get shorter the deeper we go into Major League Soccer’s 2025 regular season. Barring new signings in the summer, at some point in any season, the teams have what they have when it comes to the competence of their coach and the quality of their players, strong suits and weak links will be well-known in their equal parts.

Have the Portland Timbers reached that point at…hold on…14 games into the season? Here and there, maybe, but not overall? Nah. Let’s get to it…

About the Game
I didn’t clock how few shots the Timbers fired in Saturday’s 1-1 draw versus the Seattle Sounders until checking the final stats (still catching up, still not wholly connected to the game-day experience). Not what one wants to see in terms of offensive output, obviously, but it didn’t translate into the vague chatter I’d caught here and there about Portland being lucky to escape a loss. The Sounders found their chances – particularly from the low-to-mid 30s when the long ball to Danny Musovski and Roy…er, Ryan Kent was very much on (hold this thought) – but the final score didn’t look like they borrowed it from another game or anything, cuffs and collars matched, etc. Still, seeing just five shots total and knowing at least one of those counted as more hopeful than likely (e.g., Santiago Moreno’s at the 22nd) sets a fan to fretting about the latest drop-off on the attacking side (unless my math’s mistaken, the Timbers have been good for ¾ goal/game since the beginning of May). Per the tone of all the above, Seattle hardly piled on the chances, but I’ve already gotten ahead of myself.

Seeing Kamal Miller in a foot race with, oh, 65% of the league generally spells trouble and seeing Musovski win the decisive one felt inevitable. To his credit, Miller stalled a full breakout and Finn Surman did well to put himself between Albert Rusnak and Maxime Crepeau’s goal…only to tragically leave the five-hole open for Rusnak to shoot through. Seeing a similar play almost come off for a second Seattle goal got a couple dings out of the alarm bell, but Crepeau had a better angle to block Musovski’s shot and got down righteously to cover it. Portland hadn’t been helpless to that point - Juan David Mosquera’s solo/run shot at the 9th minute announced…a presence - but it took most of the half for them to build an attack that misdirected the Sounders defense. Maybe the surprise came from David Da Costa switching to the right, maybe it came from getting the ball behind Seattle’s midfield in one pass; whatever happened, the Sounders defense lost track of Da Costa and Moreno in rapid succession and paid the price with an easy equalizer that, despite credible efforts here and there, they never got around to erasing.

Mild Dread & the Preseason So Far

"Mild dread" is very literal on today's internet.

To get preliminaries out of the way, it’s the preseason, nothing matters, not just in the Portland Timbers extended universe, but generally, and I’m not taking much of anything, or even anything at all, from either today’s 0-0 draw against Chicago Fire FC or Wednesday’s 2-1 win over the San Jose Earthquakes. With that in mind…

Broadly
The Timbers looked sharper against San Jose than they did against Chicago, but I didn’t see much for fluid attacking movement in either game – Portland scored two goals against San Jose, one a set-piece, the other one half-trash – so opportunism looks to continue its long reign over well-oiled attacking machinery. Chicago provided stiffer competition – more on that shortly – but I don’t see the point of reading too much into any of that beyond filing away the possibility that the Fire may be further along in its rebuild than San Jose is in theirs. Based on what I saw, Portland’s 2025 Preseason First Team has some capacity to press – with the caveat that starting Felipe Mora disarms that a bit – and that gave them a good half against San Jose and a strong opening 10 minutes against Chicago. Related, I don’t expect much pressing to continue once Evander and Jonathan Rodriguez get back into the fold, but who knows?

Also, four points in two games would look a lot better if it hadn’t come against two of MLS’s most-plagued franchises (seriously, I’ve done the math, both teams are cursed). Still, Portland cleared the bar on the (meaningless) results side…woo-hooooooo.

I multi-tasked through the San Jose game (because working), so the notes below come more from what I saw against Chicago today…but I’m noting them because I believe they still (unfortunately) pertain generally.

The Lingering Issue
The Timbers continue to present as a combination of rushed and disconnected when they get on the ball. The symptoms get worse anytime they play teams that press, or even mark man-to-man, but this feels ominous against a scrolling backdrop of Portland struggling with passing and/or composure on the ball for some seasons now. A few overlapping pathologies either create or play into this problem. Because I just burned a half hour failing to wrestle this into bullet-points, and my bastard brain refused to tap-out, please consider this stream-of-consciousness up-chuck my first draft at examining the problem:

A 2024 Portland Timbers Post-Mortem: Entertaining the Possibility It Really Was That Bad

Let the image go blurry...you'll see Raffi, I promise.

As I sit down to write this, I’m not even sure that I can see around the crushing 0-5 “home” loss to the visiting Vancouver Whitecaps in the play-in to the 2024 playoffs. (Play-in to the playoffs; that had to be deliberate, right?) One could even make a case that looking past that result amounts to a demand to misread the 2024 season, to treat it as something other than a failure or, as yet another “transition season.” That last rock gets kicked around a little more below, not least because I'm no longer sure that still applies, but when your team only “makes the playoffs” through a bloated invitation list, then passes out and collectively shits themselves an hour into it? Don’t worry, I’m not even going to try to find that image…enjoy an image from a more wholesome metaphor...

Something else that’s in my head as I type this: because 2024 was my first full season on the Timbers subreddit, I have a lot more voices rattling around up there. That’s not all bad, of course – a broader perspective is good! – but digging through any accumulation of detail(/clutter) inevitably pushes you toward the trees side of the forest/trees equation and this just feels like a moment to focus on the forest, maybe figure out why all those fucking trees caught on fire all season long?

That absorption on detail expressed itself in a singular way this season, if just for me (and, obviously, nobody pushed me into all those subreddit rabbit-holes) – i.e., a loose perception that every player on the team was, in so many words, more or less fine. To be clear, yes, people on the Timbers sub-reddit (hereafter, “Over There”) did eventually start naming names – e.g., Zac McGraw ain’t doing so good, even if Kamal Miller’s making that a contest, and some dude Over There mounted what started as a lonely campaign calling for James Pantemis to start over Maxime Crepeau and, for all the doubt, even ridicule that guy endured…Pantemis did, in fact, take over the starting job – but just about every player had their champion, many of them for as long as the season lasted. When faced with a team that finished 9th in the West, aka, hanging on by a rotted toe, that cheering section shouldn't exist. Call it a paradox, call an argument for firing the coach, or just some specific coaches, or for firing the general manager, but just the loose sentiment says more about how fandom works than anything about the Timbers’ 2024 season.

Portland Timbers 0-1 Austin FC: Resistance and Young Love

First, a confession: I pay a lot more attention to a game when I’m at home. My wife will knock around for the opening 15-25 minutes – depends on the night – but, after that, it’s just me watching the game and spitting rhetorical questions into the void.

On the rare occasions I go to real-life live games – almost always from Section 210 (shout out! REGGAETON HORNS! REGGAETON HORNS!) – distractions abound. For instance, I missed last night’s only goal (Austin’s. fuckers), reminiscing with an old friend about another old friend’s family all had “hobbit feet.” If it wasn’t that, it was the couple straight-up dry-fucking in the row immediately in front of me. Seriously, light grinding started around the 43th minute and that graduated to full-on grinding and his hand up her shirt by the 80th.

Suffice to say, I didn’t pay perfect attention to this game, and yet, these are my notes…

1) The Game Was Better Than the Result
Swear to God, I will put the minimum amount of lipstick on this…I can’t say “pig of a result” because, all three points dropped aside, the Timbers piled on the chances and in numbers that, eight times out of ten secures at least one goal, sometimes two more, and often all three points. In this case, the official stats for this game do the double work of confirming and denying reality: on the one hand, you saw all the chances; on the other, you saw precisely why they didn’t go in. If Austin excelled at anything last night, it was getting dudes in the way of almost everything Portland attempted in their defensive third. How MLS stats-hacks landed on just two blocked shots for Austin, I’ll never know.

Portland Timbers 4-2 Los Angeles Galaxy: ADDRIAAANNNN!!!!

Best scene. No notes.

The subtitle for the preview I posted for this game referenced Rocky III. Anyone who has seen that movie fully appreciates its merry absurdity, the boxing sequences, in particular, where large men (and Sylvester Stallone), arms rippling with muscles, landed one head-removing blow after another. None of them had any effect, of course, until they did and every single boxer in the movie stood there, arms at his sides as he had no other choice besides taking it. Blocking a punch is and was for weaklings and commies in the Rocky Extended Cinematic Universe, apparently.

The Portland Timbers' rapturous 4-2 win over the Western Conference-leading Los Angeles Galaxy followed a similar script. Between the construction and particular competencies of both teams, I doubt this game could have ended any other way. As predicted in that preview (c’mon, let me have it; I get so many of these wrong), this game was destined to be a free-swinging brawl. The only open question was which team would land the most swings.

Now, because I’m both on the clock and old…

The Very Basics
That didn’t mean the game didn’t start with some tentative jabs, a period where both sides studied the opposition for openings. The Galaxy fired the first best shot somewhere around the 14th minute, but the Timbers fired the first shot to go in. Evander started getting frisky shortly after LA’s shot – an attitude Portland desperately needed on the night – and mere minutes after firing their first real shot, he played a center-to-touchline-to-center give-and-go with Jonathan Rodriguez, who found a pocket and nodded home a whistle-clean opener.

Portland Timbers 1-0 Seattle Sounders: (Complicated) Glory! + League-Wide Shit!

Oh, I'm just getting warmed up....

I was out of town for the Portland Timbers checks-all-the-boxes 1-0 win over a (punch-drunk) visiting Seattle Sounders team, but tracked the game from afar on the socials (i.e., reddit and Bluesky). People bitching about the broadcast team (Taylor Twellman and Jake Zivin, I think) popped up here and there and…I just don’t get how anyone can’t screen out the chatter, never mind get caught up in the relative amount of praise they heap on one team or the other. In my experience, color commentary follows the “broken clock” rule, with some hacks hitting the mark more often the others.

Why start there? Perhaps because some thoughts and arguments floated below may fall short of expectations for proper fandom. Let that come as it does, I’m squeezed a lot into this one post. Because it has surely been kicked around both hard and long enough, I won’t burn too many words on last Saturday’s game – which, to be 100% clear, was pretty damn awesome and nifty…it just needs an asterisk, maybe two.

The (Righteous!) Big Picture
Apart from giving up what (giving the Timbers’ history) felt like two games worth of corner kicks in the first half alone, I don’t recall a time when Seattle looked to have the upper hand last Saturday. Even if Portland’s chances weren’t all gilt-edged, the thought process behind them shone through; half the time, they failed due to some combination of a runner being half a step ahead or behind or the angle on the pass 10-degrees off. With key starters like Felipe Mora and Jonathan Rodriguez absent courtesy of varying amounts of bullshit (now half-corrected!), that shouldn’t surprise anyone. With the chance creation that little bit off, the happy deflection that transfigured Juan David Mosquera’s goal into a thing of beauty felt right at home. As for the play that led to it, what was that but vintage Timbers soccer?

The brighter notes played on the defensive side of the ball, and mostly through Timbers defenders throwing themselves in front of the best chances Seattle created. Dario Zuparic stood out there, with his block on Seattle’s not-yet budding star Pedro de la Vega as a stand-out moment (if it's not in here somewhere...crime). Kamal Miller got caught behind the ball now and again, and both fullbacks got burned 1-v-1 more often than any Timbers fan wants to see (Mosquera, in particular), but all concerned recovered well enough and generally played for one another. Now, about all that…

Club Leon 1-2 Portland Timbers: What You Learn & What Applies

Not tonight, not today, potato, pot-ah-to

I’m not going to dig too deep in the Portland Timbers late, glorious 2-1 win over Club Leon in Leagues Cup play tonight, mostly on the grounds that there’s not much to carry over between Leagues Cup and the MLS regular season…or is there?

Very Brief Summary
Leon looked set to make the 1-0 lead they laid down at the 12th minute hold up all night (also, helluva shot) – i.e., they collapsed on 50/50 balls fast enough to turn them into 60/40s, the Timbers struggled to play into their defensive third like a mime doing the wind bit, and they couldn’t really get so much going.

By my estimation, three players – Eryk Williamson (who had some redeeming to do), Dario Zuparic, and Antony – gave a hearty “not tonight!” to all that, and in that order. When they stepped forward, the rest of the team followed and they collectively started to punch out of the semi-defensive crouch suggested by Phil Neville’s line-up. They brought back the 50/50s, generally let Leon know they had a battle on their hands, if not a game. As the minutes ticked above 60, the Timbers took Leon out of their game.

It didn’t come together all at once, but it didn’t really have to. Without hazarding a guess at the actual game-plan, starting The Millers, Eric and Zac, on either side of Zuparic and Zac McGraw, screamed “just don’t fuck up.” Leon put the Timbers in plenty of jeopardy - more in the first half than the second (highlights!) - but they gave the Timbers heck over the first 10 minutes or so of the second too - but the rotations came through and Maxime Crepeau cleaned things up every time they didn’t. All that brings me to a phrase in my notes:

“highly episodic game”

At the 58th minute, Leon held an eleven-to-three advantage on shots. Some better than others, to be sure, but that impression of each team’s output tracked as roughly correct. In a live demonstration of how and why this result turned to Portland’s favor, the Timbers cut Leon’s advantage to eleven-to-six shots fired just two minutes later, courtesy of a flurry of them that started when Felipe Mora corralled a ball over the top, cut inside, found Evander, and sat poised to be the proud father of a succession of tertiary assist. The Timbers could only punch through here and there, basically, but, at that point, they'd already had their decisive moment just over 17 minutes earlier when Zac McGraw leveled the game with a perfect placement header off a corner kick. 

Portland Timbers 3-0 Real Salt Lake: Superior Kung Fu

Cat v. Spider-Monkey style?

Well. I’ll be…

The Portland Timbers went wire-to-wire in last night’s 3-0 win over a visiting (and leggy?) Real Salt Lake team that, at the time of first kicking, 10 more points than the Timbers. This win, more than any of the five(!) that came before it over the past six games, felt like a real announcement, a throwing down of the gauntlet, and a warning to the once-betters that used to have to look a ways down the table to see the Portland…

…just to note it, but the Seattle Sounders are on a streak one-point hotter than Portland’s and the Vancouver Whitecaps kicked the shit out of St. Louis CITY FC, leaving those teams one and two points behind the Timbers, respectively. Celebrate the win, by all means, but do keep a close eye on the rearview.

A Summary
I’d barely formed an opinion on the tifo (good one, guys!) when a very much in-form Santiago Moreno wrecked the left side of RSL’s defense by spinning around a double team and behind the defense. That left him with plenty of traffic ahead, but Felipe Mora cut through it with a run in front of Brayan Vera and beat Zac McMath at the near-post. The game went into management mode for the rest of the first half – which, here, means RSL working the ball around the filed; capably; again, this is a good team who does that well – and Portland punching back in transition. A couple shots excepted – going with a break that almost broke through for RSL and a back-post chance Jonathan Rodriguez should have hit better – it boiled down to one team’s kung fu against another’s.

For what feels like the…let’s go with tenth time this season, the Timbers came out of the halftime locker room swinging (whatever you’re doing in there, Phil, whether it’s motivational speaking, a drum circle, a special kind of incense, bumps of blow, keep doing it, man!). At the very beginning of the second half, they knocked once before barging through the door with a second goal of the night, one that rode the ragged line between elaborate and absurdist. It’s a goal for Timbers fans to celebrate because they finally scored one through one of their patented three-to-four-extra-touches specials.

Minnesota United FC 2-1 Portland Timbers: Acknowledging Inevitability

I'm a horse-girl. No, seriously.

To lead this post/set of observations with something that doesn’t get mentioned nearly often enough: Minnesota United FC is a good soccer team right now. Trust me, I did a lot of maths!

I bring that up because the Portland Timbers played a better overall game at Minnesota than they have in recent weeks – even if they caught a break here (e.g., start watching this at 1:43) and there (the rest of the highlights, really).

You know where Portland didn’t play on good overall game? At home against a serially self-sabotaging San Jose Earthquakes team at midweek at (fucking) Providence Park. I embraced the win as if straight-up French-kissing that gift horse like we’re getting married as soon as pa-PA gives his blessing, but the Timbers reprised their season-long pattern of frittering away a whole goddamn home with their own unique spin on self-sabotage. Thus, and but for the ‘Quakes capacity to implode, Portland would not have that bright little blip in what has otherwise been a horrific stretch of 10 games. Again, I looked into this and can confirm that the Timbers have been Chicago Fire FC bad over their past 10 games. They have some company in their little corner of Hell, but even that stops at two to three teams.

A Summary
The stats back up my eye test – i.e., Minnesota came just shy of doubling Portland in every attacking stat; also, the Loons as a compelling attacking team, let that sink in for a bit – so, I’m not entirely surprised that the Timbers succumbed under the weight of the challenge. That said, I saw enough positives, whether true or false, for the final 1-2 result to burn a little. For instance, if this matches the actual form/rough function of the lineup pictured here, I like it more than I hate it. For all the bullets it dodged, it kept its basic shape and provided the offense with some bonafide sharp looks – i.e., there’s a reason Minnesota’s Dane St. Clair ended with as many saves than Portland’s Maxime Crepeau – and, Minnesota’s actual goals aside, St. Clair faced tougher shots than Crepeau in my mind.

Houston Dynamo FC 1-0 Portland Timbers: A More Complete Incompleteness

One way to "break" one's duck...

In my mind, the biggest question about last night’s game was which team would score first. The Portland Timbers came (god)damn close in the fourth minute when my personal Man of the Match, Santiago Moreno, found Cristhian Paredes loose on the right side of the six (gotta be in here somewhere), but Houston Dynamo FC gored the proverbial duck first, thereby taking a 1-0 lead they never surrendered. Timbers lose, Timbers lose, etc.

By the way, does anyone know where the phrase “break your duck” comes from? Yeah, I could google it, but what’s the fun in that? This stays poultry-heavy for a few, btw. Moving on…

Lacking as it was in some familiar areas - e.g., attacking verve and total concentration in defense - I don’t have a lot of gripes about Portland’s overall performance yesterday and, as a handful of people reminded me on the Timbers subreddit, they don’t often leave the “great” state of Texas with points. A point or three would have been nice, sure, but all things considered, I find it harder to argue that Portland deserved some slice of the points last night than to argue that Houston didn’t deserve all of them.

Given the way Houston has played under Ben Olsen, this one was always going to be grind. The Dynamo play a patient, methodical game and, to use a phrase I may have forgotten to get to in the preview, they can hold onto the ball until they behoove themselves (it can take a while sometimes) to swing into the attack. No less important, Houston tends to have its ducks in a row behind the ball as they push forward – and, outside some frantic moments over the opening 15 minutes, that held  last night. Feel free to chicken-and-egg this until you, a regular human, unlocks the ability to lay eggs, but Houston reliably had at least one player in the right place at all times and all night. Whether that followed from the Timbers’ lack of execution or from the Dynamo just having really goddamn good defenders – e.g., Micael exceeded my already high expectations and, bluntly, Phil Neville should have Juan David Mosquera watch video of how Griffin Dorsey plays the same position until further notice – I can’t say and it just doesn’t matter at this point.

The reason it doesn’t matter? The Timbers made the game’s one, fatal mistake and that’s all this game had in it.

New York City FC 1-1 Portland Timbers: Notes on a Palm Springs Scuffle

The Timbers ran the gauntlet today. And survived.

Just some quick notes on the Portland Timbers 1-1 draw versus New York City FC to pass on. It’s only preseason and there’s still the regular season slog to get through after all.

First, I have no actual complaints. The performance walked a line closer to fine than good, but it cast some glances in a brighter direction and left me with nothing more than quibbles to enter into meeting minutes. The Timbers gave NYC a hand on the ball (hey-oh!), and they got broken down all the way 10-15 minutes later (left two guys wide open at the back post, Santiago Rodriguez and Malachi Jones), but unless I missed something else in the first ten minutes of the second half (shower ran long), that’s pretty much everything from Les Pigeons.

The Timbers, meanwhile, regrouped nicely after going down a goal. Better, they calmed down some problems before they turned into issues (see 1b) below). After a first half where they could only find forward momentum in wide areas and struggled a touch with getting started out of the back, Portland came out settled for the second half and got to where they could throw some weight around. When their goal came – roughly 47 minutes after NYCFC’s opener – it was more opportunistic than constructed, but, again, preseason. Stuff like that only rises to an issue if it persists...and isn’t that the worry? Still, glad Santiago Moreno made the most of his defender’s slip and god bless the NYC defense for losing Felipe Mora at the back post. Seeing the Timbers send a little more menace the opposing goal would have felt better, but it is what it is, which is one point.

That takes care of the overview. Now, to tick through some details…

1) Midfield, Arrangement

So, that was probably something like a 4-2-3-1, right? Maybe a 3-4-2-1? What I picked up (generally) was Zac McGraw, Kamal and Eric Miller holding down defense, Jaden Jones-Riley in a fairly back-to-front role on the right, Eryk Williamson and Diego Chara sitting deeper in midfield, with Moreno and Antony on either side of Evander a little ahead of them, and all that with Mora up top? Even if they lined up a little different, I didn’t mind it. I like Moreno more advanced, generally, and Antony looked more comfortable to me than he did last season. Seeing the latter did the heart good because, call me crazy, but I’d like to see the Timbers up the fear factor in opposing defenses.

Los Angeles Galaxy 3-3 Portland Timbers: Bringing Home the Scraps

Not as fresh as you'd like, but still edible.

They could have curled up and passed out, but the Portland Timbers rallied on both the field and the scoreboard to tie the Los Angeles Galaxy 3-3 down in Carson last night. That said, I doubt any Timbers fan thought, “job well done,” on hearing the final whistle.

It has been a minute since I could drink in a full 90 (the win over Los Angeles FC back on September 9), so it’s possible I missed some disjointed, hesitant performances, but those words – disjointed and hesitant – paint the right picture. To their credit, the Timbers did put together the match’s first coherent moment – Felipe Mora chest-trapping a cross and pinging it into the yawning gap between LA’s Raheem Edwards and their centerbacks for Dairon Asprilla to run into; an open cutback found Santiago Moreno the doorstep for the game’s first goal (neat-o!) – but the Galaxy would equalize on a standing(!) header by Eric Zavaleta and settle into their game from there until...quite a ways into the game. They had the ball zipping to and fro by the 30th minute. Portland, not so much.

Missing a couple regulars likely played a role – e.g., Evander was out with an ankle(?) knock and neither Diego Chara nor his appendix could start – so maybe call the incoherence a testament to Evander’s growing influence on the team. Losing Cristhian Paredes at the mid-30s hardly helped (also, pulling for the guy to recover in time for his turn in the international spotlight), but the sort of global awkwardness had taken hold long before then. The usual sins followed from a team playing uptight – stray passes, disconnected movement, etc. – but those deficits can be redeemed (hallelujah!) when the team gives the proverbial 110%. Instead, the game’s long middle passage saw the Galaxy beat Portland to every 50/50 and the Timbers regularly at least one step behind.

And yet Portland still took the lead in the 38th minute when a...reasonably-worked, set-of-their-flaming-trousers move up the middle ended with a last-gasp cross bouncing off Zavaleta’s chest and into LA’s goal. Put a pin this moment because it pretty much defined both game and result.

Portland Timbers 2-1 Real Salt Lake: Exciting in a Way You Don't Exactly Like

GOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!

The title speaks to most of my thoughts about the game. And yet does that shoe really fit? And do we have to call in Cinderella for the tie-breaker?

On the chapter level, I don’t think tonight’s the Portland Timbers’ (glorious, radiant!) 2-1 win over Real Salt Lake requires any kind of detailed explanation. One decisive, isolated moment aside – here, I mean isolated as sighting a yeti riding the Loch Ness Monster – both teams struggled to stitch together anything terribly threatening and they both looked, for a lack of better phrase, like two groups of men contemplating their near-term fate.

That broad reality doubled the value of Santiago Moreno’s early go-ahead goal. Gods know it wasn’t pretty. Evander looked to have lost control of the ball, and too close on the left to make much out of it, until he saw Jose Mosquera loose and advancing on the back post. Evander’s cross strayed just past the toe of...what’s his name for RSL, landed in the slightly-hesitant path of Juan David Mosquera (frozen, apparently, by the lingering toe), he then pitched a cross into a wide-open gap into the beating heart of RSL’s defense, and Portland’s very own, long-troubled winger, Santiago Moreno, butted it home like a Bighorn in mating season, hallelujah, it was 1-0 to the Timbers.

I want to stop here to talk about Moreno, because he strikes me as one of the two real storylines for this game - not to mention the rest of 2023, and beyond. As any tuned-in Timbers fan knows, Moreno has had an angsty season, unsure of his role on the team, maybe even doubting MLS, God, and everything. As I watched him tonight, looking a little looser, more effective, maybe even a little more handsome, I got to wondering whether anyone on the coaching staff sat him down and told him that the slate is clean, the future is now, and so on. Set aside the question of whether saying such a thing is wise or deserved, part of me wonders whether it came up on practical grounds? To maybe knock things loose with a frustrated player, one perhaps in need of motivation? Reasonable hiccups aside, it worked. I’d call that Moreno’s best game of 2023...which doesn’t feel so brave, really. After all, that's one goal, one assist, one player.

Portland Timbers 0-1 Monterrey: Why Do Birds Suddenly Appear?

Feelin' it. (With due and necessary innocence.)

The Portland Timbers started yesterday’s Leagues Cup Round of 32 game in a defensive posture so deep and passive that I worried Gio Savarese had them out with specific and deliberate orders to defend first, second, and third, so long as the situation demanded it. When Monterrey commenced to camp in Portland’s half over the first five minutes of the game...well, I’ll speak for myself here, but I was already writing the first couple sentences of this post, nearly all of which centered on how I made peace with an 0-3 loss.

When the final whistle blew, Portland had conceded just one goal – one that, to continue the record from the alternative universe of doom and sadness, followed from a cascade of errors, many from the unlikeliest of suspects (e.g., and in order, Zac McGraw, Diego Chara and Claudio Bravo) – and they came within one late, great chance by Dario Zuparic of sending the game to penalty kicks (see the official highlights, surely). That wasn’t to be, sadly and dammit, because the Portland Timbers lost the game 0-1 to (from what I gather) Mexican titans, Monterrey.

That’s not what the post is about. It’s about how the game we all actually watched started about 14 minutes in.

After surviving those opening five minutes, the Timbers played straight to Monterrey’s end the first time they got on the ball. Franck Boli, in particular, became a channel-running pest: on two occasions between the 10th and 15th minutes, he received the ball and, after flummoxing a defender or two with as many cuts and feints, he fired shots that sailed just wide of Monterrey’s goal. His second shot rolled close enough to the right post for them to decide they couldn’t risk him firing a third, so a couple Monterrey defenders chopped him down before he could fire it. The entire stadium wailed for a foul (rightly so), but none was given (Leagues Cup, man; different set of rules) and Monterrey, now on the ball, launched a counter up their right.

Monterrey’s man – was it Maximiliano Meza or Stefan Medina? – almost reached the halfway line before Diego Chara 1) reclaimed the ball and clattered him clean to Providence Park’s (possibly cancerous) turf, and 2) signaled with the volume of a siren and the brightness of 100 flares fired simultaneously that Portland came to play yesterday, and with a very real amount of belief.

Minnesota United FC 4-1 Portland Timbers: Bye-Bye Scarecrow, Bye-Bye Tin Man

And on and on until you (or the Timbers) die.

Like a car peeling off one tire after the other over 90 slow, aching minutes. As if a car could do a strip-tease before catching fire and careening into literally the nearest ditch.

The Portland Timbers utterly surrendered against Minnesota United FC tonight, and in the finest literary tradition: slowly, then all at once. The game ended 1-4 and, for all we know, started there in the right cosmological universe. All I know is that, once the game took a turn around the 35th minute, it kept driving in the same direction as if no barriers, be they natural or man-made, stood to stop it. Like every left turn in the Dakotas and every bit as God-forsaken.

To make one thing clear from the start, the Timbers never looked like winning this game. Tripping their aimless, collective way to a tie, maybe, but winning it? A team can’t score a goal until it can move the ball in some general direction thereto – a shared activity miles beyond the capacities of this forced experiment of a Timbers line-up. And I’ll pick that apart later...

It was possible to believe in that knees-knockin’ tie until sometime shortly after the 35th minute. After as many minutes of probing what they perceived as Portland’s weaknesses – a lot of it through Bongokuhle Hlongwane and toward Larrys Mabiala - Minnesota started pressing in earnest, throwing numbers forward and putting the Timbers defense under sustained pressure. To echo the popular cliche, Minnesota’s first goal was coming before well Portland’s Diego Chara clipped it into the net at the 43rd minute. Both my brain and heart checked out (so that’s...the Scarecrow and the Tin Man) after Emanuel Reynoso slipped what will go down as one of the more disputed olimpicos you will ever see at the (first half) 49th minute. And, to lay my cards on the table, I am Team Olimpico. The ball was curling in before Aljaz Ivacic punched it into the goal instead of away from it.

That was 0-2 to Portland going into the half and, whatever you were doing (you crazy ding-dong), I gave up by then.

To prove I’m no heartless bastard, yeah, the Timbers clawed back at least one goal. As much as anything else, Franck Boli proved he can score a goal if someone can tee him up right; this goal looked like Boli’s other best, cleanest shot of the season, one that came on the other side, and I don’t think that’s a mistake...and I’ll pick this apart later as well. At any rate, and whether you love it or dismiss it, Portland showed enough fight to bring the game to 1-2 and whispered “I’m not dead yet” loudly enough for the world to hear.

Real Salt Lake 0-0 Portland Timbers: Getting Satisfaction Out of a Snooze

Exaggerated? Absolutely. But...look!

I can’t count the number of times I’ve started a post with some spin on, “I’ll keep this brief,” but I think I have it this time. [NOTE: He does not.]

Real Salt Lake came out swinging strong and, yeah, that got me wondering about where things would go. Near as I can tell, it took literally one bop on the nose – i.e., a sequence where the Timbers methodically worked the ball through RSL’s press (more of a presence thing, than running players down) and capped the sequence with a quality shot on goal by the oft-(over?*) praised Evander – for RSL to gamble less and/or swing for the fences too early and more often.

This game didn’t have game-states so much as it had moments. One team or another would create an opportunity – say, RSL finding space for Andres Gomez on RSL’s right – some of those would lead to actual chances, but neither team ever really got all over the other one. Small wonder the announcers (kicking it old school with Max Bretos and Brian Dunseth) fixated on every time a player hit the post. It happened three times, though not all those chances weren’t created equal.

That wasn’t wholly unreasonable. This was a classic game where the team that scored first had a 75% or better chance of winning it...and here comes the reveal. Woo. The game ended 0-0.

In fairness, plenty of those openings yawned wide enough – e.g., that time in the opening minutes when Gomez opened enough space to for a strip mall with a cut on Claudio Bravo. There was also the header Aljaz Ivacic could do no better than swat away (have to imagine it's in here somewhere), the Jefferson Savarino free-kick that left Ivacic standing and praying at the same time, Dairon Asprilla hitting one of those shots off the post (the best one, for my money) just one minute later, or Justen Glad’s devilish knuckler that Ivacic slapped away like a hot potato dipped in roadkill. It’s less that nothing happened, than not a whole lot and very little of interest did.

It's possible I flagged the wrong weakness for RSL in my distended preview (scroll down). Bluntly, they seemed to give up once their best moments dried up – hitting highly hopeful shots from range, attempting passes that felt like real-time proofs of the perfect being the enemy of the good, slowing down when they should have sped up, etc. Bottom line, they ran out of ideas and vividly. I saw plenty of people slam the announcing team, but they clung to one telling detail, and rightly so: RSL hasn’t scored in 370(+) minutes. You could see why tonight.If I were an RSL fan, I’d be ripping my hair out....oh, wait, I watched the Timbers first fives games of 2023. RSL fans don’t know pain...