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| The boy who cried wolf as an angsty teenager. |
Very much related, the Timbers’ wild 3-3 draw at Real Salt Lake defies rational explanation. It was what it was and is what it is. It was necessary to endure the first half, experientially, in order to understand the full import of the second, it is always darkest before the dawn, and on every bloody morning after, one tin soldier will ride away.
Game Notes
The Timbers were very bad in one half, and just good enough in the second to smuggle one point out of Utah. Call it a Tale of One and a Half. I’m sure RSL fans feel aggrieved at the result, for a variety of reasons, but I’d peg one key moment as a shorthand for how/when the game went off the rails for them.
You could see RSL’s ‘keeper, Gavin Beavers (great name, no notes), scrambling to get his defense organized ahead of the corner kick that led to the Timbers’ first and fairly shitty goal. It recalled the boy who cried wolf barking at the villagers when shit got real, at long last, and it went just as well. The cross came in, Eric Miller nicked it more than he met it, but chaos ensued, and the ball rolled to Antony and he, for lack of a better verb, bumbled the ball into the net. At that exact moment, “the most dangerous lead in soccer” went to high alert.
The punchline to the whole thing: RSL had every reason to ignore that boy crying wolf. Their defensive shape and movement had Portland flustered to where they couldn’t connect more than two passes that didn’t go backwards. The Timbers midfield, in particular, didn’t seem to trust one another on either side of the ball; support failed to arrive on the attacking side, leading to wingers getting isolated and Felipe Mora operating in a void, and no one had a clear grasp on how to pass off players and rotate into cover on the defensive side. Between a defense as disarrayed as the Democrats and an offense that barely got off the couch (the Timbers’ official xG in the first half: 0.09), Portland looked doomed to a blowout.
