Portland Timbers 1-2 Seattle Sounders: Spurning Gifts

FUCK YOU! (A metaphor)

A handful of metaphors come to mind for this one - including a decent painting ruined by someone dragging a smudge of ink across it - but that one feels right for telling the story of that confounding damn thing we all watched a few hours ago.

I’m seeing a light split in opinion online, mostly around the question of whether or not the Portland Timbers controlled a game they ultimately lost 1-2, and in more ways than one. On the latter, Jeff Attinella’s (at time of writing) freak injury around the 70th minute, which left the Timbers in goalkeeper purgatory, i.e., a space where you factually have a goalkeeper, but do you? - no offense to Hunter Sulte, but you’re not really supposed to go that far down the depth chart to find a guy to push between the sticks, at least not outside a feel-good movie with that right outcome, but here we are. There was also Diego Valeri getting stuffed on a penalty kick by Stefan Frei, then getting handed a second chance on the penalty, only to shank that one off the post, then knock back his own rebound. (I’ll just go ahead and admit I forgot that’s a no-no.) My frustration with this game comes from/with that moment. I’ll get to that…

I hereby note the box score, mostly on the grounds it shows an even game (but do give that passing map a gander), but also because it shows something I wouldn’t have guessed, i.e., Portland firing as many shots as Seattle. A few only come back to me because I wrote them in my notes - a pair by Marvin Loria (more later), in particular - but my primary recollection of this match sees Timbers’ players giving-and-going all around the 18, sometimes poking through the odd ball, but mostly moving around a lot to get an obstructed view of a goal, only from a different angle. The thicket of Seattle defenders never left the front of the goal and Portland’s attackers seemed bound by some silent agreement that they’d bash through that or lose trying. When I tweeted, “shoot the ball, please,” it didn’t come from nowhere.

Still, between that set of factsd and what Sounders head coach Brian Schmetzer said at the half, I’d call that a kind of control: Portland won most of the 50/50s, I don’t think Seattle wanted to lose the ball where they did, or as often, and Portland didn’t have much trouble advancing the ball. In my book, that’s control. All that delivered some chances - e.g., a cut-back from Valeri that Jeremy Ebobisse will bury when he’s match-fit - but it mostly applied pressure on Seattle’s defense and kept them on the back-foot. And, when a team plays from the back foot, they sometimes make mistakes - e.g., Seattle’s Shane O’Neill to roll forward a lazy pass that Eryk Williamson stepped into and fed to Ebobisse, leading to a Timbers’ penalty and a chance to take the lead. Which, given the Timbers’ struggles with getting a clean look, counts as a gift.

Club America 3-1 Portland Timbers: A Gordian Knot of Failure

If only it was that heroic. And simple.

I have a couple starting points for this one, but both point to the same broad idea.

The CONCACAF Champions League (CCL) is a strange annual ritual, a sacrifice where misplaced hope dies at the feet of at least two undeniable realities. One, Liga MX teams have bigger, better-compensated rosters and hail from a country with a stronger, longer tradition with the game. Two, the tournament is scheduled when most Major League Soccer clubs will be at their weakest and least prepared. They face a two-fold disadvantage going in every time, in other words, and…I just don’t get that. Trouble is, I can’t think of a better point in any given calendar year that doesn’t pose a problem - e.g., drop it in the late-to-mid summer and you level the playing field for MLS teams, but who wants a cheapened tournament of any kind? It’s a classic Gordian Knot, only in the form of an international club soccer tournament.

Due to when the respective leagues’ seasons happen, it’s possible there is no good way to optimize this tournament…but that doesn’t that beg the question of why it happens at all? I mean, is there a point to walking through a foregone conclusion? Fuck it. I type all that as someone who loves this tournament like one of my kids, unconditionally, even when it starts experimenting with hard drugs, and so on. Next point…

I saw people tweeting all kinds of grief at Claudio Bravo tonight, and there’s no question he struggled out there tonight. I’d throw Juancarlos Van Rankin under the same bus; both fullbacks struggled - not that I’d really fault Van Rankin for the cross that lead to Club America’s first goal, because two dudes v one dude - but even that begs a very sharp question: does it really matter whether or not Portland’s fullbacks struggle against a team they won’t face again until they return to the CCL, and maybe not even then?

The short answer is, no. The only thing that matters going forward is whether both fullbacks are good enough for MLS regular season play. If they hold up there…honestly, why give a shit about what happened tonight?

Allow me to elaborate…and how have I not mentioned that Club America won leg this 3-1 yet?

Portland Timbers 2-3 Los Angeles FC: Do It for Tiffany

I'll do anything, girl...

What was the most important part of last night’s game: Jeff Attinella’s colossal, opening-10 fuck-up, or the series of aggro-pointless skirmishes that tripped one over the next for the last five minutes of regulation? For me, that depends on one’s willingness to see each of those moments in symbolic terms.

To lean into controversy early, I don’t want Attinella to start until Steve Clark gets injured, Attinella’s nerves calm down, or Clark has a collection of episodes that evidence some equal or greater measure of nerviness than Attinella’s. I think Attinella is a damned good goalkeeper; I also think he’s set up a long-term campsite in his head and, until he packs out of that fucker, I’d rather see Clark start. Mind, this isn’t some kind of “Jeff Out” campaign; I’m just noting it as a big deal for scale.

Attinella owns just one of last night’s goals – and Los Angeles FC scored three of ‘em on the way to the 3-2 win they stole out of an…engorged Providence Park (let me have it; just this once). Other Timbers fathered LAFC’s other two goals: Jorge Moreira for dozing off and letting Diego Rossi slip past him to score their second goal, and (probably) Jorge Villafana for failing to track Latif Blessing’s second run to knock home their third. LAFC put up plenty of shots – like this one, for instance, which should’ve deepened Portland’s hole (because LAFC was on a roll; but it’s not like they’re dipping SKOL/Bandits) – and the fact they didn’t gives LAFC something of their own to think about. As well they should, the bastards…

…look, LAFC is the soccer team equivalent of the rich, new kid who shows up at your high school, and he’s better than you at sports, he just humiliated you in debate club warm-ups, and now you’re worried about a bunch of other stupid extemporaneous shit because of all the insecurity that follows from those realities, but it’s cool. You just need to get your head on, and your shit together, because that kid is soft…somewhere. It’s just…you haven’t figured out where, but you will. Or, rather, you have to, or Tiffany might dump you for him…I mean, she’s always been out of your league…

Columbus Crew SC 1-3 Portland Timbers: A Delightful Response...to Everything

Not the Wes Anderson-inspired image I imagined, but still solid.

For your own benefit, drop the phrase “or so it appeared” at the end of every sentence below, and send a thank you to the profit-grubbing partnership of Major League Soccer and ESPN for instituting a black-out policy that forced me to watch this game with one less eye than usual. (Which says so very much.) That’s your caveat for the post below and, crikey, I’ve never used the phrase “I’ll just fucking walk away” about soccer in my life. Well, except that one time I shut down this site. I really did forget about that…

That’s to say, the only version of the Portland Timbers’ 3-1 (three?) win over Columbus Crew SC was the 20-minute one, e.g., the condensed version available exclusively on the app I was compelled to download (GRUBBING BASTARDS! OK, it’s out of my system, but do insert the magic phrase after every sentence). With that, I’ll start to talk about the game…instead of cable TV’s cadaverous grip on what’s left of their profits…sorry. For real this time.

“Again, I really like the response from Portland.”

- Columbus Broadcast-Booth Guy, I think

I totally agree, Columbus Broadcast-Booth Guy! As much as I can only have a head-full of disconnected thoughts on this game, I was delighted to see every Timbers player flying into every 50/50, and in every frame. They didn’t play hungry, the played starved – as well they should have given the start. Even if this loss dimmed their star – perhaps more than a little – Columbus is a 4-3-1 team, with a 3-1-1 home record (no less significantly, do the math on the number of games the Crew have played at home). Given Portland’s record coming in – and their defensive record as much as anything else – this projected as a win for Columbus, maybe even a chance to knock a couple teeth out of Portland.

It went the other way, obviously. The question is why.

Los Angeles FC 4-1 Portland Timbers: Letting Jeff Down.

A wrong turn was clearly taken.

[Ed. – Spring forward caught up with me around midnight last night. Or it might have been the large containers of very strong ale. Either way, midnight felt like 3 a.m. I regret the delay.]

Had you turned off the TV (or, you piece of shit, opted to break the Seventh Seal on all things that are holy and left the stadium during) the Portland Timbers' 1-4 loss to Los Angeles FC at the half, where would you have pegged the final score for yesterday’s game? Close observers will recall that the score was 1-2 at the half, and in LAFC’s favor, but, based on what you’d seen to that point, how where would you have thought the game would end? A 2-2 draw? A 3-2 win for Portland? A 2-3 win for LAFC? What about a 1-5 loss for the Timbers?

That dip into a counter-factual comes in as an attempt to retrace the steps between here (call it the end of the first half) and there (the final whistle) to see if we can’t figure out where the wrong turn (in which they missed the bridge and plunged off the cliff and into the river) happened. Overall, the game played out fairly clear game states: LAFC scored the first goal during an opening 20 minutes of beating Portland to every ball and winning ever duel; the Timbers responded over the next 20-25 minutes by doing very close to no wrong, and scoring a goal of their own (at least they won the duel of the headers). LAFC would take over completely in the third and final game state, or, as some would call it, the second half.

I think the only question comes with identifying the precise moment that cracked the Timbers’ will. As much as it hurt in the moment, I’m hereby pulling the nomination for Christian Ramirez’s first-half-capping game winner, and on the advice of my gut (the thinnest of all grounds). With just two candidates left in the running, was it Carlos Vela feeding Adama Diomande for LAFC’s 3rd goal, or was it Diomande feeding Vela for LAFC’s fourth 3-4 minutes later? Or were those awful 3-4 minutes the Timbers pivot straight to Hell? On a higher level, did the Timbers fall apart or did LAFC pull them apart and is LAFC (perhaps) that good this season? In the end, where is the balance between LAFC’s (allegedly) great attack or the Timbers (allegedly) shitty defense?

On Portland’s side of the ledger, the conundrum comes down to this: at times, the Timbers played unstoppable soccer going forward, the kind of switched-on/half-blind riffing that ladders the ball upfield in a way that’s impossible to stop…at least without Jeremy Ebobisse seizing up on the kind of chance that makes a forward a forward (for the record, I really wish that highlight reel came in 2-3 passes earlier). The Timbers played some incredible, seeing-eye stuff yesterday – at times, the attack hummed with ambient beauty – but, Ebobisse’s one goal aside, they could only create danger, but not goals. Still, they put in a respectable shift, one that would do most road teams proud. Their aim wasn’t so good, and giving up four definitely leaves a mark (more below), but they played a better game overall than that score suggests. One simply must wonder what might have been had Ebo put away the gift of a break-away by Sebastian Blanco.

FC Dallas 1-2 Diego Valeri: Call It a Post-and-a-Half...

OUR LORD AND SAVIOR.

The nice thing about playoff games is that they are fully and entirely present. A future of any kind exists for only one of the teams and that reduces everything to a series of moments - e.g., Diego Valeri (literally) slamming home a free-kick (and after FC Dallas players/fans had their beating hearts ripped from their chests), or Jeff Attinella smartly positioning his head to deflect a sure goal off his crossbar. C’mon, you know Jeff went low and kept his head high on that…a master class in misdirection.

And yet, I find myself wanting to talk about nothing but those little steps up the several flights of secret stairs that brought the Portland Timbers to this ripe moment of possibility, and a 2-1 win over FC Dallas in Texas. The total number of staircases falls a little short of the Winchester Mansion, but the Timbers gave old lady Winchester a run for her money…and for saner, séance-free reasons.

Portland’s game-winning goal contained a couple of the elements - e.g., David Guzman, who served the perfect pass to Jeremy Ebobisse, and Ebobisse for having the strength to shrug off the defender hanging off his shoulders (Reto Zeigler, right?), and the speed to elude a sprawling, stranded Jesse Gonzalez, to feed the assist to Valeri, who, just to note it, looks spring-flower fresh at the moment. To credit one of the other final pieces to Portland’s best-possible puzzle, Liam Ridgewell has looked like a DP defender since coming back from a variety of ailments, both physical and mental. Tonight’s win displayed the benefits of having players fill in the spaces around the guys who drive the team - Valeri, Diego Chara, and Sebastian Blanco - and, more to the point, the whole damn thing held up in spite of Blanco hitting a couple strokes over par.

I want to pause here to thank Nate Silver for my late, heightened understanding of polls, statistics, and averages. By that I mean, one team having a 4 in 5 chance of winning a game means that the other team has a 1 in 5 chance by translation (association? alchemy? fuck it, I flunked two kinds of math twice). As he explained, that 1 in 5 translates to a 20% chance that something happens, and that’s at least a half dozen steps below rare. I put up a bunch of tweets earlier today outlining why I thought the Timbers had a better than even chance to win tonight (even if I lacked the won-tons to say that outright). God’s honest truth, I’d have put Portland’s chances at 3 in 5 to win, and for all the reasons I noted - e.g., rest, having sharper attacking players than Dallas, and, more than anything else, Dallas being shit in front of goal of late, and against bad teams. Traveling stood as Portland’s biggest handicap, but they goosed the odds on that by, again, resting their best players in the final game of the regular season. And, to answer the question begged in my post on that game, the gamble paid off.

Portland Timbers 2-2 L'Impact du Montreal: Thank You, Evan Bush

Anyone have Evan Bush's home address?

To start with the obvious, the Portland Timbers have neither scored so many, nor allowed so many, shitty goals in the 2018 season than they did in last night’s 2-2 draw (at home, dammit) against L’Impact Montreal. They’ve run a tight ship over the past dozen games, but that ship sprang some leaks over their last 90 minutes of play - and, arguably, over their last 180 minutes of play. With their U.S. Open Cup loss to Los Angeles FC, you could point to the subs (as I did in here, David Guzman), the quality of LAFC, and say, “Professor Green, in the bathroom, with that tactical combat knife he ordered online.” The clues don’t add up as easily for last night’s draw.

I’ll start by saying, 1) I’m not panicking, and 2) you lose a little nuance when tracking just the results. I’d heard the rumors that Montreal’s defense had improved, but argued (or held out hope) that the teams their defense had improved against comprised some part of the improvement. That said, if there’s an edge to give in tonight’s game, the Montreal Impact scored the better goals. The Timbers, on the other hand, dredged dark, disgusting things from the grime of the ballast deck. It is what it is, the unbeaten streak continues and, to bright side things a bit, the Timbers came back twice, thereby scooping their points out of some tight spaces.

All that said, this was a bigger result for Montreal. I’m high enough on Portland to think they should have won this game outright and with little complication…and then L’Impact scored the first goal. It was a pick-pocket classic, a toe-poke on a sloppy pass, the kind of play/goal the New York Red Bulls have ridden to success in recent seasons. The Timbers back-line responded…poorly, getting stretched to and fro (Lawrence, Lawrence, Lawrence), but plays like that file nicely under “it all happened so fast.” If anything, Montreal’s second goal was worse, one of those wax-on, switch-off situations that follows from a long ball (by Ignacio Piatti, of all people) to Matteo Mancosu, who had so much net to shoot at that it would have been harder to miss his shot (Jeff, Jeff, Jeff). That was the second go-ahead goal for a Montreal team that should have had none. And yet they did.

If there’s a worrying trend of any kind for Portland, it’s letting in the first goal. If there’s a horse they’ve ridden to success, it’s scoring first, or keeping the other side from scoring at all. That matters because this Portland Timbers team is designed to hold the game together until it takes the lead. That’s the logic of the Christmas Tree - i.e., you can’t score on me, but, if I score on you, you’re fucked, because Christmas Tree, motherfucker. It wasn't clear how regularly Portland managed games until I went back and counted last week, but that dynamic - i.e., scoring first, etc. - has defined the team's unbeaten streak. Back to Montreal, and their defense, I think I read they’ve adopted a similar system - and, with that front three (e.g., Piatti, Mancosu, and Alejandro Silva) they, like, Portland, have the talent to attack on the cheap (i.e., by committing fewer players). Montreal definitely played compact last night, a 4-5-1, with the “4” and the “5” in easy spitting distance of one another (“Stocky Christmas?”); they set up in a way that required the Timbers to break them down…

The Late (Late) Tackle 12 16 2016: Portland Timbers Trade Crap, FC Dallas Keeping Busy, and January Camp

I’ll be waiting, my lov…OH MY GOD, WHAT’S WRONG WITH MY FOOT!?

I’m half following a couple Portland Timbers-related things on twitter, something about Jeff Attinella (which sounds like it’s got a little traction), plus something about centerbacks at or around 30 years of age.

I like Attinella. Have seen him stand on his head in a couple games. Competition is good, so it’s good to see someone come in to push Jake Gleeson, especially when you feel good about both competitors. And they are vying for your love…

…I’m in the lounge, gentlemen, on the fainting couch. Don’t make me wait too long…

Starting elsewhere in Timbers world, however (wait, no, you just started with…never mind).

A Future Without Taylors

Because I don’t think there’s a dissenting opinion on this, I’ll just note Steven Taylor’s departure from the Portland Timbers. Here’s to wishing him the best, and a future in a league where attacking players are slower in body and thought…

…to hit this from another angle, though (and, please, tell me I haven’t already), as much as this Taylor particularly worried me, I am a little anxious about the magnitude of the turnover in the Timbers’ defense, and the roster as a whole, at time of writing. I know there’s always an argument for just ripping off the damn band aid, and lord knows the Timbers need to get younger (and faster) back there. Still…The Kick Off ran a piece from a site that covers the Philadelphia Union. The article talks about how the Union needs to manage a transition in their defensive set-up (for they did struggle), and while the particular dynamics aren’t anything like identical to Portland’s, I like the guy’s thought process.