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| Timbers = All the people. And the pig. No winners. |
Because there’s not a lot to say about the Portland Timbers
2-0 preseason loss to the New York Red Bulls, this won’t take long. In fact, I
have only one real question to ask:
Yeah, yeah, this is preseason, but why did Portland look
that much more like the team in preseason mode?
To speculate, it could have something to do with the
strength/organizational integration of the Red Bulls’ academy; it’s also worth
wondering whether Red Bulls II's 2016 (rather impressive looking) USL title lent them that telling little
extra bit of coherence. The lesson from the former suggests that, maybe the
Timbers organization ought to get crackin’ on its own academy. As for the
later, yeah, Red Bulls II not only won last year’s USL title, they picked up 29 points more than Timbers 2 during the season.
As pointed out during the stream, New York could have won by
3-0, or even 4-0. Second stanza ‘keeper Kendall McIntosh probably played the biggest
role in preventing that outcome. Overall, though, I found the incoherence
mildly concerning at most, with a series of bad decisions, particularly at the
back, nipping at its heels. More fundamentally, though, this is precisely why
teams play preseason games – i.e., to, in in the spirit of Stumptown Footy’s title,
to shake off the rust.
