Seattle Sounders 2-2 Portland Timbers: We'll Always Have the Laugh

[DRAMATIC MUSIC!]

I’m going to start this post with two observations brought to mind by too much time on social media and too many years of staring at some version of the same thing one week after another.

Fans should appreciate perfection when they see it, as opposed to expecting it from any player. Because that’s just the world/humanity works, we’re none of us, etc. This mind-set is one of several reasons why I can’t coach. (“Hey, sometimes you just fuck up. No biggie. Love you, man.”)

Once (most) people make up their mind on a given player, he/she is either the shit or total shit. Once they think he/she is bad, all they see are the mistakes and once they think he/she is good, it’s nothing but the good stuff. It’s damn closer to binary. Swear to God.

As for the game, the high-comedic 2-2 draw between the Seattle Sounders and the Portland Timbers up in the frosty climes of the Puget Sound, I have more questions than I have answers, by which I mean I have only one real answer: I’d say about 75% of the success the Sounders had over the first half followed from the way they nipped at Portland’s collective heels over 2/3 of the field. Once they lost that, courtesy of a second yellow to Seattle’s Leo Chu, all you had left was two teams a year or two removed from their best days fighting over scraps. Hyenas versus vultures, basically.

To acknowledge something, Seattle got screwed hard by that sending off. Chu picked up his first yellow for one of the most randomly puritanical rules of the modern game – e.g., the shirtless goal celebration (WHY IS THIS A THING?) – and his second for, I shit you not, getting the worst of running headlong into Portland’s Zac McGraw. It takes so, so very much for me to agree that a referee’s decision decided a game, but Jon Freemon (a referee I do not know) cut off Seattle’s clearest path to success with an excessively legalistic reading of the rules and....just a bad call.

Don't get me wrong: knowing how pissy and bewildered Seattle fans are this morning is just the best. And that is what will have to pass for satisfaction on a night when the Timbers more or less stalled in their attempt to make the 2023 playoffs. Now, some more detail...

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.

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.

Portland Timbers 1-1 New York City FC: No, It's Okay. Feel Disappointed. You've Earned It

I also want a new drug.

I fully intend to give the Portland Timbers’ 1-1 home draw against New York City FC exactly as much as it deserves and not 20 words more. We’ll see how I do...yeah, it's the same old shit, quality variable.

First, and pursuant to today’s earlier post, no, not good enough. On the plus side, Portland caught some breaks – e.g., Real Salt Lake continuing its soft home form against (the road-ready) Minnesota United FC, and Sporting Kansas City falling as flat against Chicago Fire FC as the Timbers did last Wednesday, i.e., they coughed up three desperately needed points...and isn’t the complaint in the end?

And that goes double, given the other results that went all wrong – e.g., Austin “managed the first half of the bookend” (see "today's earlier post") by walloping Houston Dynamo FC 3-0 tonight while the Vancouver Whitecaps smeared shit all over the Los Angeles FC narrative by beating them 3-2, in Los Angeles too. To loop back to today’s earlier post one final time, yeah, I missed over half the calls (see the paragraph above, as well as this one re Austin), but literally everything in that post relies on the Timbers doing something besides forever burying themselves in the sand (or whatever the hell weird kids do in the backyard sandbox; also, use rubber gloves, always) and, the Timbers simply haven’t done enough of something in this 2023 season. And so they remain below the playoff line.

I have fewer notes on the game itself than I have random notes on things, but to wrap up the game...also, that's another lie. Damn my long wind....pah-fffftt....

First, I’d argue that Portland owed most of whatever success they had in the first half to more or less stuffing NYC’s equally flaccid attack. The sobering, dunk-your-face-in-a-sink-full-of-ice-water reality is that the Timbers struggled to create much more – i.e., I feel like the 1.0 xG posted to The Mothership’s stats page paints a fairer likeness of the Timbers’ game-long threat than the 1.76 xG that AppleTV flashed at the end of the broadcast. In literally any other season over the past (is it?) twelve, I could have looked at tonight’s shot generation – e.g., Claudio Bravo’s shot to the far post, Juan David Mosquera’s late slice over the crossbar, the great look a sharper Santiago Moreno would have put away (dammit!), orEvander’s last-gasp free-kick that pinged off the post – and transmuted that disappointment into some form of hope. In a season where the Timbers’ goals per game barely gets its nose above 1.0 goals per game, however, I can't make the stretch go so far. Again, this is a team under a playoff line pushed low enough to let freakin’ toddlers onto the Disneyland ride of their wildest, indestructible-youth, “cartoon figures never die, so how can I?” fantasies...and is there anything of any consequence after that?

Portland Timbers 1-2 Chicago Fire: Playing to Their (Damned) Level

Spinderella vibes.

What in the sweet, sweaty balls of Chubby Checker was that? A 1-2 loss at Providence Park to a team that is both historically and currently bad, obviously, but...well, how the fuck does that happen? Yes, even in a fucking “transition” season.

To recap, the Portland Timbers failed to capitalize on a glorious opening - one carried to potentiality by the divine wind of the gods (or gremlins in the turf tripping the Chicago Fire’s last defender), I might add – due its latest (literal?) record fucking signing losing the ball in his feet at the critical and yet somehow eternal moment (I yelled “Boli! Boli!” to no one in particular for felt like a full minute; in here somewhere, or least it should be), and then the Fire score a soul-stealer of a winner – what? – ten minutes later. To paraphrase a prescient, and now-curs’d man on twitter, “now watch [Kei Kamara] rise like a salmon to score.” And so he did.

Short version, the Chicago Fire (the Fire!) beat the Timbers 2-1 tonight and, to paraphrase a great Dan Savage bit, this is not the match review I wanted to type tonight. Like I say to the dentist every time, let’s get this bullshit over with.

I didn’t see any clear reason why Chicago won tonight. Sure, they started the first half well, and the second, but, as suggested by The Mothership’s xG graph (which is to say I agree with it, and scroll down), no flashing red lights announced either team’s intention to score. Will Robinson was not in danger. My anxiety about the Timbers generally and damnable lolly-gagging bubbled over into the game thread about five minutes after I felt it; the time had come to push the game, push it real good...

...and that’s the story, isn’t it? This current – a word I mean in the hyper-present tense* - simply doesn’t have it in them to push the game, never mind real good (Don’t talk about the win over Seattle...not now). The grasping at straws continues – and full credit to Marvin Loria, a player I pick at every time I mention his name, for finally showing some kind of urgency with his stoppage time shot and forcing a corner kick, but that showed up 20 minutes past too fucking late. Just four, five minutes prior, I watched and wondered when I’d see any Timbers player show for the ball in a way that felt like a demand. I can’t name one player who showed a clear, unflinching willingness to take charge of this game.

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?

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...

Portland Timbers 3-1 Vancouver Whitecaps: They Wore Green and Gold (Yes!)...And It Was Good

If you know, you know.

Forgive me Father, Mother Mary Full of Grace (full of grace! full of grace!), the bless’d angels and the Holy Spirit, I turned off my late, late viewing of the Portland Timbers 3-1 win over the Vancouver Whitecaps at the 85th minute.

And yet I’ll argue that made decent sense.

To start with something I saw in a tweet – and by no means am I shitting on the original tweeter (and I couldn’t tell you who it was, gun to my head) – I saw this described as (paraphrasing) “the Timbers making a pretty good Vancouver side look pedestrian.” I want to dig into that from two directions.

First, how good are the Whitecaps, really? My best description: better than the av-e-rage team, but only just. That’s on a high-level, nuts ‘n’ bolts level – e.g., their goals for (15) and goals against (12) against the league average (14.24) – but I have a couple thoughts in my head that push back against the “but numbers love them” argument.

Eight of those 15 goals came in two games – the recent 3-2 win versus Minnesota United FC and the earlier 5-0 drubbing of Club de Foot Montreal (aka, Simon Becher's debutante ball) three weeks before the latter got their groove on. Yeah, yeah, the ‘Caps beat the Timbers at BC Place some weeks ago – a game that...did not go well for Portland (though I did search for silver linings with a magnifying glass and tweezers) – but I also just ticked through Vancouver’s every win of 2023 and none of those teams rolled into the foot of the Canadian Rockies as their best selves (though the Timbers were one game from the/some shit straightening). In a lot of ways, and to lift up a cliche that answers “but the numbers” cliche, The ‘Caps are exactly what their record says they are: a middle-table team. But that’s just starts the answer...

I’ve watched all or large portions of five Vancouver games this season and...well, they’ve never “wowed” me. As I said in the last preview, I see them as a team that goes about the business in a very business-like way; those of you who watched at home might have heard Ross Smith’s digression about “no outstanding players” and that’s just a big “yep.” The phrase “collective spirit” stands in for “no one really spectacular to see” not so much nicely as appropriately, soccer players making soccer plays, etc.

Portland Timbers 2-2 Austin FC: A Test of Character (& Budgeting)

The Portland Timbers’ 2-2 home draw versus Austin FC gored at least one theory, but otherwise felt like weights falling on both sides of the scale. To be clear, I hated seeing the damn thing balance as much as any Timbers fan...like I said at the top of last night’s game thread, this was an occasion where the Timbers didn’t want to do anything they wouldn’t later regret. And then they went ahead and started Larrys Mabiala....I kid, I kid.

I’ll get to something like a match report in the next – sorry, no, one two three paragraphs after - paragraph, but I want to linger on Larrys for a bit (note: that’s a good adult film title, right?). For all their faults – and this is literally one of them – the Portland Timbers have brought me to an understanding of the true nature of defending. Those “[___] Days Since our Last Accident/Accidental Decapitation” signs at your local light-industry warehouse offers the perfect metaphor: the whole thing is about avoiding the next mistake for as long as possible, only all while knowing the mistake will come. Typing as someone who got dumped into the defense far more often than made sense (I sucked at defending), I wholly, fully and unashamedly embrace the argument that defenses get faulted for their failure to never fail in a way that the attacking side of any team rarely does...good Lord, these things are getting confessional.

Anyhoo, and to finally get back to Larrys, his game last night had a familiar pattern: he was fine for large stretches of the game – he even cleaned up a mess than Juan David Mosquera handed to him on a steaming, stinking platter – and then, nothing like out of the blue, Austin’s Owen “Coach’s Son” Wolff finds a bunch of space on Portland’s left late in the game (but not for the first time) and curls a cross into the heart of the defense. Now, I want to ask everyone reading this post to stop here and look at the Austin equalizer that yanked two points from the Timbers’ grasping hands. The video geeks did well with it, for what it’s worth, giving you plenty of time to see that Mabiala kept pretty fair track of Austin’s Will Bruin, he knew where he was and all that, only to somehow get separated in the decisive moment. Bruin almost certainly bumped him, but Larrys just played that whole thing wrong – if in a way I visible in 20/20 hindsight. Still, one lapse equals one goal allowed too often to count and the Timbers still lost two points on one brain fart...or two, if you want to count the fact that either Wolff and Ethan Finlay had time to whip in that cross.

St. Louis CITY FC 1-2 Portland Timbers: No Comments, But Also Three Pages' Worth

Kid's already miles deep on, "you just made the list, mate."

What’s that phrase? No comments?

No comments because that Portland Timbers win checked every box.

At the apex of the glory, a defense stayed organized and held strong, and then one player put the team on his back and ran till they got proverbially there. Even more important, the Timbers took control of a game for the first time in 2023...sorry, the second; the way they stomped Seattle seems like something I usually keep between me and my therapist. At any rate, after a desperately drab first half, the Timbers either got a locker room stemwinder or they figured out that St. Louis CITY FC didn’t have their whole heart in tonight’s game. Once it became clear they could take the game to St. Louis, the Timbers kept yelling, “please, sir, may I have another,” kind of like an Oliver gone gritty on a revenge bender, until they answered back to St. Louis’...let’s call it complicated equalizer....

...and that’s another box checked: the offense repaying a good game by the defense by clawing back one goal.

The Timbers have never looked as much like a professional soccer team as they did tonight, not in 2023, not like you, not like me, and, yeah, I’m starting to trust my credulous eyes more with each passing week. To finally get to the lead, the Timbers beat St. Louis, the best team in Major League Soccer’s Western Conference coming in to tonight, 2-1 and at their place...wait...oh my God, I finally found a linguistic detour around “at home.” Sorry to interrupt, but this is my Mount Baker at a minimum.

Before digging into the rest – and, honestly, even acknowledging the timeline – I have a couple notes on St. Louiis. This was either the fourth or fifth time I’ve watched them this season and, outside last week’s draw at Colorado, I’ve never seen them look so...what’s the word...less like they'd spent the afternoon blood-doping and doing all-day two-minute hate sessions at every Timbers player. When I watched the Colorado game, I put the absence of their xA (xpected Aggression) down to saving their lungs for a full 90 at altitude. After tonight, I’m starting to wonder if they’ll already hit the fundamental limitations of relying on “playing at 11” as a strategic choice. They didn’t have Joao Klauss – who, to his very real credit, has Maxi Urruti-level qualities at brain-fucking defenders – and that left Eduard Louwen trying to do everything with, as I once said without the information to back it up, “MLS average players.”

FC Cincinnati 2-1 Portland Timbers: That Hurt, but It's Over, Bring It In, Guys

Bad man, tenuous metaphor.

If you haven’t watched Peacemaker (which I'd call both specific and 2/3 recommended), and want to duck any spoilers, now is a great time to skip to the third (sorry!) fourth paragraph.

For those who have, you’ll recall that Peacemaker has this horrible, actual-Klan bigot of a father who raises his two sons on violence. They get along great, no clear sibling rivalry, etc. (stick with me through this stretch), but he still has them fight to, in the white supremacist tradition, “toughen them up” in service of the terrible idea that motivates such assholes. At any rate, one time he sends them into a pit he dug in his front yard (again, these are not deep thinkers) for another fight and he’s nakedly pulling for one brother over the other and, wouldn’t you know it, his favored child catches a punch wrong and dies...

...that’s less a perfect analogy than the latest pop culture reference I’ve read about obviously favoring one child over another and things going sideways.

First and foremost (and unlike the fight in Peacemaker), FC Cincinnati and the Portland Timbers put on a better-than-expected show tonight. They traded somewhere around the same number of blows, fought roughly as hard - though, to my surprise, Cincy out-muscled the Timbers – and deviate too wildly on the numbers. While the Timbers had their share, Cincinnati ultimately found the wider openings, held off something of a grabasstic (two “s’s” in that or...?) rally, and ultimately held on for what I’d call a by and large deserved 2-1 win. And, unlike that horrible bigot of a father, I still love and support both of my sons.

I went into the game more worried about the Timbers, naturally, but I’d argue tonight showed them still progressing. They managed to pace more than one portion of the game – the start of both halves, mainly, and then the end after Cincinnati fully committed to the counter to close out the game. Cincy, meanwhile, took over longer stretches – particularly the 20-minute spell of the first half, when they clawed control of the game back from Portland and pressed and pressed until they broke through (hold that thought), and again after stifling the Timbers’ attempted rally at the start of the second – and all that feels like a good shorthand for the state of both teams. Portland’s improving, but Cincinnati has a capacity to stomp its foot on the game in a way the Timbers do not...

...have a mentioned how hard it is to focus on both sides of the ball yet? Which, as implied, goes against the concept of focusing? So, doing my best on the rest, with an assist from the highlights.

Vancouver Whitecaps 1-0 Portland Timbers: A Riddle to Solve

It'd be better if it was better.

I have so many thoughts.

One, would I take Vanni Sartini as a coach just because I like him? For all his shortcomings, yes. Yes, I would.

Second, while there’s absolutely no question that the better team won...did the Vancouver Whitecaps actually blow off your doors and/or socks? On the one hand, absolutely, they generated literal multiples of more offense and forced...holy shit, eight saves from one of the Portland Timbers’ few bright spots tonight, Aljaz Ivacic. On the other, the ‘Caps fired a (reported) total of 13 shots. Even with a disturbing number of those going on goal – and Ivacic’s numbers 100% back this up – I’d argue that tonight made a decent argument that Vancouver’s actual level falls closer to what they’d done over the first five games of the season (when they went 0-2-3) than what they did in the 6th (the shellacking of Montreal...who got drubbed again tonight, btw). Pursuant thereto...

Second Point, First Addendum: what does the above statement say about the state of the Timbers?

Second Point, Second Addendum: what does that say about tonight’s result?

With the scaffolding now built, let’s dig into all of the above.

To circle back to the facts, the Portland Timbers lost tonight, 0-1 at BC Place in Vancouver to the Whitecaps. If asked to answer the question, how did it go, I’d point to the literal two fucking shots Portland fired tonight. And zero of those went on goal, for those counting at home. I know I can’t make a plausible argument for any Timbers fan to feel good – particularly anyone who saw that wet, steaming pile of futility – and yet I’m going to try.

FC Dallas 1-1 Portland Timbers: Better.

Dallas translated through bowling.

After a season that has started with what can only be called incompetence – which, at times came in the flaming variety - it felt pretty damn good to see the Portland Timbers achieve the opposite in yesterday’s 1-1 draw at FC Dallas.

Over the Timbers’ first five games of the season, I had to dig at least shoulder-deep into the barrel to pick out good performances. Zac McGraw’s name has come up in most games – take a bow, young man – Dario Zuparic almost as much, but the list has generally been short, allergic to padding and concentrated in the defense. The larger problems, not to mention the outright failures, have come at the collective level – i.e., players, even league legends (see, Chara, Diego) looking shaky playing the ball forward and an attack grabasstic up to the point of mutual incomprehensibility. Hope walked lightly on the land, in other words; outside of a couple promising starts that only felt more heartbreaking by promising more, her feet may have never even touched the ground.

Weighed against such a lowly level, the Timbers knocked it out of the park in Dallas yesterday. Without declaring this draw an actual turn-around, and with a full acknowledgement of the final score duly acknowledged, I’m content to call Portland’s first (more or less) quality game of 2023 a kind of win.

For all that, Dallas tends to offer a shifting yardstick. I noted in the preview that people rarely rate them as a contender and games like this get at why. They struggle to string together good results, which means they struggle to generate real, season-shaping momentum. Now, had Jesus Jimenez not strayed offside, thereby cancelling out the insurance goal/tap-in that Alan Velasco scored almost immediately after Dallas went ahead after Facundo Quignon made good on three minutes of pressure and as many corner kicks in the 74th, I feel confident saying that Portland would have been, in fact, fucked. So, yeah, Portland caught a break or two. Moreover, there was more than a little but for the divine (delighfully pissy) grace of Aljaz “All the Jazz” Ivacic, because the Timbers’ defense gave Dallas several cracks at both go-ahead and insurance goals...and gods only know why Portland would start anyone but Ivacic anytime he’s available at this point. If you haven’t seen some of his saves, do yourself some good and make your heart a little bigger by dipping into the highlights from this one.