Portland Timbers 2019 Season Review: A Requiem on a Season...Ahead of a Complicated Season

In the top 20 for "end of an era" and it's exactly as shapeless as I want it to be.

“I’m not expecting glory, but I’m also not bracing for disgrace. The goal Portland scored tonight shouted loudly back to the team that punched five, ten feet over its weight through the 2018 post-season. This team at its best really is something – and it has been for years. The concern is that it’s been too many of them.”
- Notes from a 2-1 loss to the Los Angeles Galaxy in LA, and 4h game of the season.

“As I see it, Portland Timbers 2019 never turned into a team to get excited about; it’s a team to support in the hopes of giving guys like Diego Chara, Diego Valeri, and, sure, Sebastian Blanco, and maybe even Jorge Villafana another happy memory before they check out.”
- Notes from the 2-2 road draw at Sporting Kansas City in the 2nd to last game of 2019.

A lot of games came, went and exhilarated or disappointed in the space between those two quotes, and the specifics about each of those games probably undercut whatever point I’m about to make, but it makes sense to me, so I’m rolling with it. The first quote above comes out of a match review of the third game in a five-game losing streak, one that happened at the very start of the season. The second quote comes out of notes on a third draw in three games of the not-doing-nearly-enough that typified the end of the Portland Timbers’ 2019 regular season. The first quote reflected a sort of conventional wisdom that the Timbers, a 2018 MLS Cup team with most of the same starters returning, would find their feet in the middle of a, frankly, awful fucking start to the 2019 season, and so everyone waited and, crucially, believed. The second quote came from the second-to-last game of the 2019 season, which gets at how long it took for people (including me) to accept that the Portland Timbers 2019 would not end in glory. Sebastian Blanco turned in one of his better performances of the latter half of 2019 in that game – all the regular performers did - but the Timbers as a whole couldn’t bring it home. They fell short at a time when they should have been doing the exact opposite.

If you put your money on the Portland Timbers to win MLS Cup (or even reach the semifinals) at any point after mid-September of this season, you’re the author of your own emotional damage; the writing was on the wall by then, and damned lurid. By which I mean, it was so obvious at that point that the only open question was when the Timbers would check out, not if.

Notes on a Weekend Without Soccer: A Position Statement

The past couple weeks, maybe even the last month, have been the strangest and most uncomfortable in my 23 years of following Major League Soccer. More precisely, the last three years have been annoyingly fucked up and the proximate cause is Trumpism. Anyone who finds that argument unfair, or just plain wrong…just stop. You’re wrong. Politics has invaded every inch of our increasingly cursed lives since Trump took office. Speaking as someone who has read and tracked politics for as long as I could process it, it has never been like this, not in my lifetime. The country is arguing very loudly about the kind of country it wants to be and the kids are, naturally, freaking out.

And that sucks. It’s getting harder and harder to find spaces where you don’t need to think about our visibly panicked and confused president, or the people who think he’s the greatest thing to happen to this country since…what the moon landing? Joseph McCarthy? Some mythic past a critical mass of people digested from television and now confuse for their own lives? The positions are so profoundly entrenched that people don’t even operate from the same reality.

That makes creating neutral spaces very tempting, but also impossible. And, to expand the conversation, the people who are grievously pissed about MLS trying to chase politics out their stadiums should consider how much that decision follows the same logic of trying to make public spaces secular, so as to not favor one religion over another. Personally, I’m delighted with religion-free public spaces (I’m merely agnostic on my more spiritual days), but tens of millions of Americans think that’s why the country is going to hell. As such, they keep fighting for prayer in public schools and singing the national anthem, like, way more often than I think they should.

The rest of this both carries that word “fighting” forward and also quietly lays down in a corner. Americans who wanted to keep God at the center of public life never stopped pushing to make it happen. And, when they didn’t get there, they created work-arounds, some of them frankly, racist – e.g., opting out of the public schools where their kids should attend, because fuck community if it means sharing the classroom with them (more on that). To me, that’s arguing that some Americans are more equal than others, and I’ve got no time for that bullshit, if you don’t like it, fucking pull on your big boy pants and improve those classrooms.

Portland Timbers 1-2 Seattle Sounders: Fuller Than Your Average Evening

That flag only hurts fascists and snowflakes.

Last night was a weird one, no question. The Iron Front protest happened, of course, and few things surprised me more than seeing not just an Iron Front flag waving, but a big, gigantic motherfucker of an Iron Front flag, and a with a backing chorale of little DIY-homemade versions swaying around it. And, for those who don’t watch the local nightly news, KGW gave so much of its opening segment to the protest, that they gave just a barebones reading of the final result – a frustrating 1-2 home loss for the Portland Timbers to the hideously-attired Seattle Sounders – at the end.

I saw boasts of victory scattered here and there on twitter last night, but honestly have no idea how this (profoundly silly) ban plays out. God knows what would have happened had Providence Park security waded into the Timbers Army to seize that flag, so thank God they didn’t, but there will be a next time and less attention, so there’s that…and, no, I don’t get it. It’s not like the Iron Front flag slips off the stick, floats into the night to stalk your children and Trump-loving grandparents, but willful misunderstanding of what antifa is and how it functions is all the rage in your more self-interested political circles (who brought the bag of dicks to the potluck, dammit?).

Reports of a meltdown at the Timbers Army by Timbers owner Merritt Paulson for “costing us the game” spiced the post-game lather as well, and it’s worth contrasting a rich man whining about a group of people interfering with his vanity project against the same people displaying their anxiety about white supremacist douches popping up all over the country like poison mushrooms (and with President of the country winking encouragement its way). Call me crazy, but one of those feels bigger than the other. That feels like this political moment in microcosm, as well my expectation that our corporate masters would roll over for fascism-lite so long as the trains ran on time and people showed up for the games and smiled and sang and forgot all the trouble visited on other people, etc. Moving on....

Obviously, a game happened as well. It didn’t end well, and even that was a rich experience of more lows than highs. After going down two goals – more on that later - the Timbers pulled one back with a mildly cheap deflected goal by Diego Valeri; from that point forward, a barely competent siege ensued. A couple things stood out, both after Valeri’s goal and before it. When Portland tried to force the ball up the middle, Seattle littered the path with athletic bodies; as several teams before them, the Sounders seemed fine with letting the Timbers play wide and cross – something that did with a maddening mix of frequency and incompetence (fwiw, forty-five (45?!) crosses is high). To direct your attention to a more relevant part of the boxscore, the Sounders swept the defensive stats - tackles and duels, in particular - and that matches what I watched out there.