Late Tackle 01 19 2017: Questions for the Timbers, Chicago's Rebuild, and 10 Other Things (or Players) Who Excite Me

Dream big, Fire fans...could be your bandwagon...

In keeping with this site’s practice of starting local…

The Oregonian posted one of their damn slideshows (sorry, hate the things, because they feel more about the ads; yes, I’m aware of the state of the news industry) that framed the issues facing the Portland Timbers in the form of 11 questions, some more pointed than others. To quibble with the premise a little, I’d argue that, if you can come up with 11 questions – if you get that granular – you probably have 20+ questions. To hit that from the other side, with the way personnel overlaps and cross-pollinates, I think the Timbers have between three and five questions to answer in 2017.

I’ll come up with those later (tomorrow, maybe; or Monday), but, for now, the best question of The Oregonian's 11 was the last (paraphrasing): are the Timbers good enough to make the 2017 playoffs?

And they flagged the one major detail that slips my mind every time I think about the Portland Timbers: how large-scale erratic they’ve been. Or that’s just another way of admitting that the flukiness of the 2015 Run to Glory still somehow doesn’t sit right with me. At any rate, that whole “erratic” theme is something head coach Caleb Porter has to answer for.

Moving on to other pastures…

MLS Week 25: (Loose) Playoff Talk (and Prepping for the Future), Plus Midfield Conundrums

What? Seriously? MLS Cup better be up there...

Due to this week's late start (my Portland Timbers thing went up Monday, fer crissakes) and just a fucking mess of a week, I have to go general and short (as I can make it) on Major League Soccer Week 25/26 Review/Preview and...hold on, is that gentle breeze that just fluttered my hair a collective sigh of relief?

And, barring further vacillation, the Beer and Shots Review will be replaced by Review/Preview posts going forward, which, ideally, will go up Wednesdays. Look, it'll all make sense by the time 2015 ends. Trust me. Moving on...wait, first, below are the two games I took in over this past weekend.

Portland Timbers v. Houston Dynamo (already written up at some length)
Columbus Crew SC v. Sporting Kansas City (recorded at right...and that's it)

Between time and having several other things on which I'd like to focus, I have only one really important direct point about Week 25: the mirrored fates of Kansas City (two reputation-denting losses) and the San Jose Earthquakes (who, on the back of two consecutive road wins, both of them impressive, suddenly look like Bad Soccer just revived its curse) tell anyone who follows the league everything he/she needs to know. Good teams will stumble, while bad teams will rock, if only for a while. Because, MLS. Internalizing that applies to both long-time fans of MLS (like me), or the greenest, noobiest of new supporters: the former forget how much parity defines the league, while it will take the latter a while to fully appreciate that reality. More (and less) on both points wind in and out of the narrative below. It's this fall’s now-abruptly-impending playoffs that I want to talk about today.

It took an article posted on MLSoccer.com – they called it the "Red Line Report" – to shake me from my annual summer slumber. Without that, I would have gone right on recording each week of the season with the same rough awareness and conscious thought that a marathoner puts into thinking about each foot-fall just one mile in her race. Consider, however, that the overwhelming majority of MLS clubs have fewer than 10 games in which to declare their intentions . And that’s not just for the post-season, but what sort of figure they'll cut once they get there...and, for my Portland Timbers, this space expects "dashing." If there's not a trail of multi-colored rose petals sprinkled along a sun-dappled path to MLS Cup, all I can say is that the Timbers will really have to pull out several more stops, at a minimum, if they expect any nookie over the winter.

MLS and the Global Tipping Point

Not Olympic, yet somehow totally appropriate.

Where is the tipping point? That’s the question under examination here.

When Major League Soccer (MLS) kicked off with a handful of U.S. World Cup heroes and some decently high-profiled internationals (here, I'm thinking of guys like Carlos Valderrama, Roberto Donadoni, and Marco Etcheverry), the league came off as a carnival barker's novelty. Even as MLS has grown and, somewhat recently, noticeably improved, it has never shaken the minor league status.

One major assumption has held through all this – the idea that any given American player's ambition is defined by his willingness to go to the European big leagues. Failure to find his highest possible level and test himself against it was, by definition, a preemptive denial of whatever potential he, or his career, had. Anyone who doubts this should read up on Landon Donovan's career, who could never do enough during his time with Everton because he failed to transfer to the Liverpool club outright.

A number of Americans – maybe one score, maybe two (maybe more; fuck it, I'm not counting) – put in real time in various European top flights. While some other enjoyed more success with individual clubs – here, I'm thinking Clint Dempsey and Brian McBride at Fulham, or maybe Sacha Kljestan at Anderlecht - Michael Bradley probably compiled the most storied and prolific European career of any American player. And then he came back to MLS. Like Dempsey, like Kljestan, like Jozy Altidore, etc. etc. That's all pretty new, so I guess we're all still sorting out what that means.

Harrison Shipp and the High Road to the Promised Land

Their rituals remain...strange to us.

Player interviews provide interested, even eager, fans with some of the dullest content they will ever read. Even if 99% of athletes possess a seemingly impossible talent for sucking life out of clichés, a reader gets lucky sometimes. It could be the interview features a player from the blessed 1% implied above. Or maybe a reporter frames a question just so. For example:

"Last time we spoke you talked about the broader perception that American players lack the ability to play in a creative midfield role. How much does your desire to change the perception of American creativity motivate you and how much added pressure do you feel when you’re in that position?"

 88 (Eight-by-Eight)'s interviewer, Robert Kehoe, put that question to the Chicago Fire's Harrison Shipp. Shipp only confessed to "loving" the pressure of carrying the "creative player" torch for America’s Young Turks, but he didn't elaborate. That seems a shame what with how that question gets at everything from player development to larger issues like soccer in these United States and even the Jurgen Klinsmann Project.