10 Thoughts I Had While Watching the Timbers Slip One Past LAFC

First image for "schadenfreude"

Massive damn win for the Portland Timbers last night. You don’t have to love and/or celebrate every facet of the game to accept that…I said to the imaginary person I saw complaining about it. [Ed. - It’s me! He lives in my head and he’s kind of a dick!]

Let’s get to it, speed-round style…

Los Angeles FC 0-1 Portland Timbers FC SC SP Heroes
The Game, Still More Briefly
More back and forth than the final stats suggest, though the majority of the game played out in the middle space between both teams’ defensive thirds and it wasn’t always inspiring. You’ll see good chances in the full highlights – I’ll touch on a couple below – and, with admission to a two-fold bias (I’m a Timbers fan who likes seeing LAFC fail), I thought the Timbers got the better of them (e.g., David Ayala at the end of the first half, David Da Costa in the early middle of the 2nd half (best shot of the game, probs) and a better build-up/decent shot by Ian Smith late in the 2nd). I have many questions about the state of LAFC after watching – at least two appear below – and those inevitably color how much I trust this result as a step toward progress.

Related, Portland didn’t win the game on their best chances. They won on a set piece, scored by Cristhian Paredes, a four-time starter who has played just under a third of all available minutes in 2025 (aka, 595 minutes of 1980, sans stoppage). Rookie Ian Smith served the cross, a player with a mere 29 minutes more played (if with two more starts) than Paredes. Served and server aside, it’s possible the Timbers benefitted from LAFC going with zonal marking on the corner; in any event, no one came within a yard of Paredes until it was too late.

With the state of LAFC duly stipulated into the record, the Timbers played a genuinely impressive defensive game – and I’d call that worth two uncomplicated cheers. I have more on this below, but on a big picture level, whether full-field, whether pressing, whether covering the space behind, the Timbers defense did their homework, got the math right, and walked into the LA night deserved winners. Almost certainly related, this result pushes the Timbers’ defense further to the right side of average in terms of goals allowed in 2025.

Portland Timbers 3-3 Los Angeles FC: A Daydream, Shattered

A whole lot of "ohmm," till Bouanga fucked it up.

Tough nut to name, really. Walnut? Pecan? What delicious, high protein nut best…embodies tonight’s tantalizing 3-3 draw at Providence Park versus Los Angeles FC? I’m going with pistachio, because those fuckers can be hard to crack.

About the Game
The full highlights haven’t been posted as I type (nvm, went up as I typed), so I’m leaning into bare chronology on this, but one simply can’t escape the feeling that the Portland Timbers let a couple points slip through their toes tonight (game played with the feet, etc.). After going up by two goals – the first, a (deserved) penalty kick earned and (dare I say symbolically?) scored by Felipe Mora, the second, a plum of a finish by Santiago Moreno on an attacking move that typified the night* – the Timbers looked as steady and assured as I’ve seen them all season. Olivier Giroud scoring his first goal of 2025 on the stroke of halftime didn’t change that impression, coming out of the back-side of the blue as it did, and I spent the first half of the second half daydreaming about how I would characterize a home win over an LAFC side that has struggled early and traveled poorly over the opening weeks of 2025. The gap between David Martinez’s equalizer and Felipe Mora’s go-ahead goal**gave me a mere two minutes to second guess that daydream, so I, for lack of a better phrase, drifted back into a space that felt one glorious hell of a lot like the first half of the super-fun roller-coaster good-times of the 2024 season. Despite disturbing signs from the outside – my handwritten notes back up the final allotment shots/shots-on-goal in the official stats - that pleasant fog enveloped me all the way until somewhere around the 90th minute, when Diego Chara caught Denis Bouanga’s toe in the area, Portland's favorite referee, Guido Gonzalez, Jr., pointed to the spot and Bouanga leveled the game with a stone-cold penalty kick. Don’t know why the danger signs didn’t flash earlier, or why I didn’t see them if they did. Maybe I was blinded by the Pants over my eyes…

…have I mentioned that LAFC probably should have gone up 1-0 by the second minute? This was a wild one, soccer’s version of a feeding frenzy, if until Portland’s second go-ahead goal. To float a theory/response: is it possible Portland taking their foot off the gas doomed them to the draw? Against that, did they have the legs to do otherwise?

Los Angeles FC Scouting Report, Everything to Play for, Even More for the Hype

This somehow relates to Consumer Cellular. Yay!

The lazy shits that run The Mothership no longer post live links in the Form Guide. Getting up to speed on work-arounds played a pretty big role in the shift in content. The MLS app is weird and I’m bitter, strongly thinking of complaining to AARP and Consumer Cellular to see what they can do about it. At any rate, on with the show, this is literally it.

Los Angeles FC
4-4-0, 12 pts., 10 gf, 11 ga (-1); home 3-1-0, away 1-3-0)
Last (why not?) Six Results: LLWLLW
Strength/Location of Schedule
@ SEA (2-5 L); v ATX (0-1 L); @ SKC (2-0 W); v SD (2-3 L); @ HOU (0-1 L); v SJ (2-1 W)

Really trying to tighten up these posts and in several ways. Doing this live and from the top, we’ll see how it goes…

The (Not So) Brief (about as well as expected)
Between fixture congestion and players coming in and out of the lineup (likely due to fixture congestion), LAFC hasn’t started so good - so maybe they don’t mind Miami shoving them out of the CCC. They kicked off 2025 with a couple stingy home wins (versus Minnesota, then NYCFC) before playing four of the next five on the road. They picked up three points across those four road games, all in a comfortable win at a, frankly shitty, Sporting KC team (who, fwiw, looked just as hapless, yet better than they did hosting the Timbers); they also gave a marginally-less shitty Houston team its lone win of 2025. Seattle kicked the shit out of ‘em, but LAFC had some positives to take out of the San Diego loss, despite going down a player around the 60th; they created good chances after Igor Jesus checked himself out. Not a lot to love about road life for this team…

Up until last week, Steve Cherundolo loved his 4-3-3 – a line up that suits them, in my mind, and best represented (in my mind) by the lineup at San Diego – and mostly tinkered with it. Timbers fans will see a lot of familiar faces – e.g., Hugo Lloris in goal; shifting pairs at center back around Aaron Long and Eddie Segura; Ryan Hollingshead running up and down the left; Tim Tillman and Mark Delgado in midfield and…probably Denis Bouanga? – and have some sense of what they do. New faces include former Dallas defender, Nkosi Tafari (eh), Jesus at somewhere between a No. 6 and a No. 8 (also, eh), and a pair of promising young ‘uns around the wings in Nathan Ordaz and David Martinez. Despite having a couple starts up top, Olivier Giroud already looks like an after-thought (good comedy after the in-house propaganda (aka, the Onside series) fluffed his arrival), and it’s hard to know how much game they’ll get out of new left back Artem Smolyakov, but he scored an elegant goal at San Diego.

Getting Reacquainted with Los Angeles FC, It Rose from the Corpse of MLS 2.0

The Honey Pot, starring Henry Higgins (1967)

Thumbnail History
As a preliminary, I decided to burden Los Angeles FC with the Chivas USA’s record of failures and accomplishments. The judges (in my head) have allowed this on the grounds that, 1) Chivas USA was created with a potential advantage – e.g., access to the player pool/any rising talent of their parent club, Mexico’s Club Deportivo Guadalajara, S. A. de C. V. – and 2) only three years separate the good and wise demise of Chivas USA and the founding of LAFC. To anyone aggrieved by the choice, bringing in the predecessor’s softer numbers does less damage than you think (only shaved off four Joy Points*), while also imbuing the successor project with the air of a phoenix rising. Anyone paying attention to the chronology of this series may be crying foul on behalf of Atlanta United FC and Minnesota United FC, but I liked the idea of putting Major League Soccer’s two foreign-held subsidiary franchises in back-to-back posts (the New York City FC post went up yesterday).

To quickly touch on Chivas USA, it was conceived as a honey-pot to lure Mexican-American fans to MLS at a time when the league was hard-up for eyeballs. The initial concept boiled down to bringing in, admittedly surplus (i.e., aging), but still famous talent from Mexico’s Chivas, sweetening the pitch by throwing in some potential future stars for the parent club (aka, longshots), and rounding out the roster with whatever non-Mexican players Chivas USA could find between the 2005 Expansion and SuperDrafts. Legendary Mexican midfielder Ramon Ramirez and (I think) Francisco Palencia headlined the effort, but the first-year model went to shit in one short season. It took only one swat from the Wooden Spoon at the end of 2005 for Chivas USA to (largely) abandon all that and become a more or less regular MLS team, effective immediately. The front office gave the team an MLS face-lift for Year 2, calling in midfielder Jesse Marsch as an on-field Svengali, while also bringing in proven experienced pieces for the attack (Ante Razov) and the defense (Carlos Llamosa and Tim Regan). All it took from there was one good (Jonathan Bornstein) and one great pick (Sacha Kljestan) from the 2006 SuperDraft to carry Chivas USA to their first post-season in 2006 and lift them higher still in 2007, when they won the Western Conference. From there, things fell off one season at a time and, slowly, the organization fell apart. By the time all concerned pulled the plug after the 2014 season, I think most MLS fans forgot Chivas USA was around until they showed up on the schedule…

Los Angeles FC 3-2 Portland Timbers: A Long Journey to Nowhere and No Points

Up next, an endless lecture on wormholes...

Well, if that game didn’t barf up talking points like a frat boy sailing three sheets into the wind…

The answer to the question where to begin starts at the end of the first half with the Portland Timbers crawling into an 0-2 hole right ahead of the whistle. The entire half had…more or less sucked, but the Timbers had held on to where the optimistic sort could see them keeping things goal-less and having time to reorganize – particularly on the right side of defense where Juan David Mosquera faced acres of space to manage and a rampant Denis Bouanga to contain. Very much related, Los Angeles FC scored its first goal on the dozenth-plus time Bouanga got loose over there and cut a lethal ball across the area that slid well beyond the tips of Maxime Crepeau’s otherwise excellent fingers. When Portland’s Kamal Miller slid to meet it, he hedged the angle a couple dozen degrees inside and that put LAFC 1-0 up.

There’s nothing to do after that, of course, but to have all concerned dust themselves off, clear their heads and limit any further damage. Yeah, no, that didn’t happen. And I’m going to make a point here that will no doubt get me down-voted to oblivion on Reddit, but I’ll die on this hill: on the one hand, nearly all of LAFC’s most threatening approaches came from Mosquera’s side; on the other, that was always going to happen and what is the rest of the defense/team for if it isn’t to put out the fires he starts?

As anyone who read the scouting report below knows, I was bullish Portland’s chances in this game, if with terms and conditions. One big one: locking down the space where God, all the angels and everyone else knew they’d attack – i.e., through Denis Bouanga and at the right side of the Timbers defense. So, sure, Mosquera made two games’ worth of gaffes last night, but LAFC does not go into the locker room up 2-0 at halftime if just one other field player comes within a country mile of Timothy Tillman trotting up the middle of the field. With no one but an equally-exposed Crepeau to stop him, Tillman slotted home (only available in the full highlights, apparently) and that’s how Portland wound up in that deep hole. 

The final whistle blew on a 2-3 road loss for the Timbers, their (fer crissakes) seventh game(!) with one or fewer points – and, relevant to the overall situation, they’ve picked up zero points out of the balance of those games and just three (fucking) points from the last 21 on offer. And where can that leave a team but riding shotgun with the dregs of the league.

But, wait! There’s more! So much more! Not all of it good, but – hey! – some of it is!

Los Angeles FC Scouting Report, Hatred, Contempt & Gambling

Better at soccer, honestly...

I couldn’t get myself up for another deep dive into Los Angeles FC. Don't blame me. Blame the twits at Major League Soccer HQ, who forgot the adage about familiarity breeding contempt…

…related, LAFC fans have a lively persecution complex about everyone else in the league giving them short shrift and hating on them generally.

Some Basics
And…hey, it turns out I never actually previewed LAFC due to a mini-vacation earlier this month (#worth it), so may as well lay it all out. They currently sit on at 7th in MLS’s Western Conference on a 3-3-3 record, with a tight goal differential (+1), on the right side of average (11.3) for goals scored (15) and the wrong side of average for goals allowed (14). They boast a decent unbeaten record at home (3-0-2), which is all that matters for now because that’s where the Timbers will play them on Saturday (side note, they’re 0-3-1 on the road, which means Portland (or the ref that day, Rubiel Vazquez) gave them their first road point of 2024).

The Lineup
Head coach Steve Cherundolo lines them up in a 4-3-3 (like this one) as if he cannot do otherwise and the personnel remained stable through every game until last weekend’s draw v Red Bull New York when started Mateusz Bogusz over Eduard Atuesta in midfield for reasons I couldn’t sort out without getting into...lore, I guess. The back four typically features (left to right) Ryan Hollingshead, Aaron Long, (Timbers’ fans prime villain from the last match-up) Jesus Murillo, and Sergi Palencia. The usual midfield line-up has Tim Tillman and Atuesta on either side of famous car tire spokesman, Ilie Sanchez, while the front three has most often seen (again, left to right) Cristian Olivera, Bogusz and Denis Bouanga.

Another change in last week’s lineup: once and former New York City FC defender Maxime Chanot started in Murillo’s stead (I see something about a knock in Ye Olde Unreliable Availability Report) and, for what it’s worth, he looked something like incredible, dude can play, etc.

Portland Timbers 2-2 Los Angeles FC: A Meditation on Cherry-Flavored Cough Syrup

This image was called "cuddling a cow," also, yes!

Thus endeth another case study in what might have been. The game turned on a justified red card to Portland Timbers goalkeeper, Maxime Crepeau (it sure looked like Claudio Bravo kept Los Angeles FC’s Denis Bouanga onside; more on him later), and all it took from there was Mateusz Bogusz’s 51st (damn good) minute free-kick to lead to Solomon splitting the baby at one point a piece. Not much happened between there and the final whistle, if with one exception.

The Timbers got lucky to escape with the 2-2 draw because Nathan Ordaz committed no crime ahead of what looked like a last-gasp winner for LAFC. I’m a good partisan and, as such, I don’t blow air into the cow’s nose when it doesn’t shit in my living room, or however that saying goes. To put that another way, Portland may have got lucky on that one call, but they made their luck otherwise and that feels like an improvement over several of the games I’ve seen so far this season. Also, who invited the fucking cow?

If I had to name the most maddening element of the Timbers 2024 season, it follows from the fact that every result comes loaded with too many caveats to make sense of where things stand with them. Today, it was the red card, but it has been playing from a hole measured by one to three goals in earlier outings. This game provided the usual divide of positives and negatives – and I’ll get to some of them (jetlagged AF, honestly) – but my biggest personal positive comes from the Timbers going up, first, 1-0, then 2-1 on two…respectable goals from open play. I’m shading both of those, and for reasons I’ll get into, but, all in all, today’s draw might have been the Timbers most complete game of 2024.

If you’re with me, let’s run over this hill screaming! Aaaauugggghhhhh!!

Getting Reacquainted with Los Angeles FC, aka, the Spoiled Rich Kid that Transferred to Your Public School Under Somewhat Mysterious Circumstances

Still mid-orgasm. Started in 2021.

[Standing Disclaimer: While I have watched…just a stupid amount of MLS over the years, I don’t watch the vast majority of games, never mind all of them. As such, it’s fair to take anything below that isn’t a hard number or a physical trophy as an impression, a couple steps removed.]

Thumbnail History

With this post, this project arrives at the first team to play in MLS for less than a decade; Los Angeles FC has just six seasons behind them. It also gets to why, for all its shortcomings, the Joy Points Scale (methodology at the bottom of the post*) holds up all right. LAFC has enjoyed as much success as any team in the league over those six seasons. To do the math: they won one Supporters’ Shield, one MLS Cup, plus they made an unsuccessful trip to another Cup (the season just ended, in fact), and they made the playoffs in five seasons of six and, if memory serves, people and pundits read them as a bona fide contender for four of those playoff runs…

…also, what a bunch of assholes.

That’s good enough for them to rank eighth all-time on the janky little scale I concocted for this series – which gets to another truth about the American top-flight – i.e., that somewhere just shy of 20 teams have enjoyed either fleeting success or no success at all. LAFC, meanwhile, doesn’t have a history, not really, hence the temptation to roll Chivas USA into the mix and call it the history of LA's "other team." I dismissed that for the same reason I’m not counting the Miami Fusion as part of Inter Miami CF’s history. Just totally different animals in both cases.

Best Season(s)

A fucking no-brainer, obviously: they won the double in 2022 and capped off the Shield by winning what was arguably the best, wildest MLS Cup in league history (and pour one out for the Philadelphia Union for that loss). I’ve never experienced such a thing with any team I’ve followed in any sport, but imagine it feels like an orgasm after tantric sex.

Long-Term Tendencies

LAFC has a short, proud history of scoring tons of goals. Their 2019 team holds second-place for goals scored in a single season (at 72), but they’ve either been very over or very, very over the average for goals scored in, again, five of their six seasons. They even scored very over the average in the one season they missed the playoffs (2021), but even that’s a little weird given that they had a worse defensive record in MLS’s weirdest season, aka, 2020. Still, and not unlike the team as a whole, LAFC’s defenses have generally been good.

Portland Timbers 1-2 Los Angeles FC: Acceptance

Fuck it.

May as well start where the game did – i.e., with the line-up the Portland Timbers chose to field in a, for them, semi-existential Sunday afternoon. They lined up the now-familiar back three, if with the personnel gently scrambled, and Juan Mosquera and Claudio Bravo on either side of Diego Chara and Cristhian Paredes in a four-man midfield. Mosquera and Bravo played as fully-modern fullbacks - dropping back to defend and running into the attack, as needed., etc. The slightest riff on the more of the same, in other words.

The real place of curiosity, at least for me, was the front line: Dairon Asprilla and Santiago Moreno on either side of Jaroslaw Niezgoda – or at least that’s how ESPN’s broadcast had it. Then again, I’m looking at the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey version The Mothership posted as official line-up, and who really knows at this point? Assuming I have it right – i.e., Asprilla, Niezgoda and Moreno up top – the big question going in was whether that set of players knew how to handle and/or finish shot creation. Based on what I saw online, the reaction was equal parts underwhelmed and confused; “consternation” sums it up nicely.

As for me, I greeted the line-up with...all right. The broadcast team hepped me to a couple things I didn’t know – e.g., Eryk Williamson had a compromised hamstrung – but I didn’t mind it or could at least find some kind of logic to it. That assumed, however, that Timbers head coach, Giovanni Savarese, held the same thoughts in his head – e.g., that he would play a cautious first half, then trickle in game-changers like Eryk Williamson and Sebastian Blanco to salt away the big, playoff-clinching win. In short, it all made sense to me so long as Gio did certain things at certain times. For instance, get his game-changers into the game with enough time to find it.

Back in the game that happened – i.e., the Timbers 1-2 home loss to Los Angeles FC - Savarese didn’t introduce Yimmi Chara and Williamson until the 74th minute. I can’t say that cost them the game (I don’t do counterfactuals), but that doesn’t feel like enough time for most attacking players to get hold of a game. Yimmi’s special - 90 minutes may not be enough for him - but I would have liked to see another 10 minutes or more for Eryk; it’s not like Jaroslaw Niezgoda did much outside one shining moment early in the 2nd half, after all. Moreover, Eryk strikes me as the kind of player who needs some time to figure out who’s picking up what he’s dropping; Niezgoda’s seems the same, for what it's worth, but I gave up on seeing Gio put him anywhere besides the front line months ago.