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| Celebrate. The demon-child allowed it. |
Delightful. Absolutely delightful.
Blown away as I am by Dairon Asprilla’s career-year-capping, wunder-goal, the bigger, better take-away is this: think where the Portland Timbers would be today with Asprilla’s TEN (10) goals in 2021. On numbers alone, they’d be where the San Jose Earthquakes find themselves after tonight’s 2-0 loss at Providence Park: about 10 goals on the wrong side of good and mathematically out of the 2021 Major League Soccer playoffs.
The Timbers haven't stepped into the Promised Land yet - which, here, means the good bits, way past where Moses got - but they’ve bought themselves a fuck-up, maybe even a fuck-up-and-a-half, down the stretch. And I’m starting there for a reason, because a single sentence from Liam Ridgewell, tonight, from the broadcast booth, gave me the words for a concept tonight, maybe even a thesis:
Once one team breaks another, everything else goes out the window. Just put the game on ignore and enjoy it…so long as your team is one the right side of it.
Ridgewell kept going back to the idea of a game-plan, the importance of sticking with it, even to the point of eschewing tempting opportunities for heroism - i.e., know your role, operate within it, trust your teammates will do you the same, block out all the signs and voices bellowing “[YOUR COACH’S NAME HERE] OUT,” and stick with it till the plan comes together and everyone wearing the same shirt as you gets the big win. Sometimes it doesn’t work, sometimes it does and it becomes a team’s “identity,” but, at the end of it all, it’s just a set of assumptions a team plays under in order to make decisions and/or plays happen a little faster. Right?
As follows from, one team breaks another when they make the assumptions by which they operate fall apart. And, yeah, Asprilla’s goal was spectator-sports ecstasy, but the bigger, better thing framing for tonight’s game was, “there but for the left hand of J. T. Marcinkowski, San Jose would have eaten bowls full of shit.” From the time the ref blew the opening whistle for the second half to the end of the game, the game didn’t look like anything else but a Timbers win. And…confirmed: San Jose’s xG flat-lined after the 45th; it didn’t really do much from the 10th minute, honestly. Which gets back to what I’m saying about breaking a team…
Blown away as I am by Dairon Asprilla’s career-year-capping, wunder-goal, the bigger, better take-away is this: think where the Portland Timbers would be today with Asprilla’s TEN (10) goals in 2021. On numbers alone, they’d be where the San Jose Earthquakes find themselves after tonight’s 2-0 loss at Providence Park: about 10 goals on the wrong side of good and mathematically out of the 2021 Major League Soccer playoffs.
The Timbers haven't stepped into the Promised Land yet - which, here, means the good bits, way past where Moses got - but they’ve bought themselves a fuck-up, maybe even a fuck-up-and-a-half, down the stretch. And I’m starting there for a reason, because a single sentence from Liam Ridgewell, tonight, from the broadcast booth, gave me the words for a concept tonight, maybe even a thesis:
Once one team breaks another, everything else goes out the window. Just put the game on ignore and enjoy it…so long as your team is one the right side of it.
Ridgewell kept going back to the idea of a game-plan, the importance of sticking with it, even to the point of eschewing tempting opportunities for heroism - i.e., know your role, operate within it, trust your teammates will do you the same, block out all the signs and voices bellowing “[YOUR COACH’S NAME HERE] OUT,” and stick with it till the plan comes together and everyone wearing the same shirt as you gets the big win. Sometimes it doesn’t work, sometimes it does and it becomes a team’s “identity,” but, at the end of it all, it’s just a set of assumptions a team plays under in order to make decisions and/or plays happen a little faster. Right?
As follows from, one team breaks another when they make the assumptions by which they operate fall apart. And, yeah, Asprilla’s goal was spectator-sports ecstasy, but the bigger, better thing framing for tonight’s game was, “there but for the left hand of J. T. Marcinkowski, San Jose would have eaten bowls full of shit.” From the time the ref blew the opening whistle for the second half to the end of the game, the game didn’t look like anything else but a Timbers win. And…confirmed: San Jose’s xG flat-lined after the 45th; it didn’t really do much from the 10th minute, honestly. Which gets back to what I’m saying about breaking a team…
