Portland Timbers 1-0 Los Angeles Galaxy: A Parade of False Flags

Early season stupor. Also, unfamiliar.

Tonight, I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by people of good, clear insight. The Portland Timbers picked up their first road win since 2015 when they beat the Los Angeles Galaxy 1-0, and that’s a big deal. Something else slipped past me, given my anxious state, but the Timbers also kept a clean sheet today. So, thanks to @cobolsky and @brioe162, for being wiser men than me.

Still, that “anxious state” followed me home, and it revealed itself in the way some sort of invisible safety net left the game when David Guzman walked off, holding his left arm all funny. Guzman jacked his shoulder, as we all know now, even as we don’t know how badly, on what wound up being a second-yellow challenge from the Los Angeles Galaxy’s Jelle Van Damme. I watched that specific replay often as they showed it, and I’m still not 100%-clear as to whether Van Damme hit Guzman at knee level, or whether Guzman hurt himself on a leap/dive to get around Van Damme’s lunge. It doesn’t matter in the grand scheme, I mean, Guzman will take the same amount of time to heal, whether fair or foul, and that’s my biggest take-away from this game.

Things went some form of haywire after Guzman stepped off. Portland’s central defensive arrangement has functioned like a triangle through preseason and Game 1 2017 – e.g. Liam Ridgewell and Lawrence Olum, and with Guzman running in front of them in defense, and dropping between them when Portland had possession. Basically, Guzman really has (near as I can tell, and I can’t promise proximity) played as pure a No. 6 role as Portland will allow, and, once he went off, Portland reverted to Olum and Roy Miller (Ridgewell’s sufficiently creditable replacement) behind Ben Zemanski and Diego Chara, who receded to the back line in order to protect the lead, and the win. The sweet, sweet road win. Smells like honeysuckle on a June night, I tell you…

That was nice, right, sweet reverlry? Now, back to the panic…

MLS Conference Semifinals: An Assessment at the Break

Inadequate.

As much as I like the playoffs better (and with how much more I’d like with the Portland Timbers still in it now officially noted), they don’t provide much space for analysis. A bunch of things happen over each 90-minute stretch (plus stoppage time), generally/interchangeably the same kinds of things that happen over 90-minute stretches (plus stoppage time) throughout the regular season, but there’s not a hell of a lot to say about coughing up three goals in 20 minutes than, “well, guess they’ll have to score four goals next Sunday.”

That’s FC Dallas’ situation, of course, after having a team-wide episode of “The Vapors” against the Seattle Sounders to start the second half. Sure, you can explore what went wrong on each of the goals (rough night for Maynor Figueroa, but the central defense wasn’t central on Seattle’s first two), but even if Dallas can fix those glitches on the return leg, it’s likely to have the same effect as pouring a glass of water on the ashes of your house after it burned down. I’m not a Dallas fan, so I’m left imagining how slowly time passed for them as Nicolas Lodeiro’s long run outside their defense reached its inevitable, agonizing climax. Personally, I had enough time for a sip of beer on either side of thinking “he’s not gonna miss that.”

That’s a huge win for Seattle, obviously, and a huge hole for Dallas. The only question left is, can Dallas make up the scorched ground? Not based on what they gave last night. Seattle held the edge all night, for one, but the blunter reality came with how much trouble Dallas had going forward. To borrow a term from MLSSoccer.com’s Matt Doyle, Dallas is missing their unicorn, Mauro Diaz. Things didn’t look great when Mauro Diaz went down or anything, but his absence didn’t kill them all on its own. Now, however, when they need to find a way forward and a minimum of three times, too? No better time for magical beasts.

Portland v. LA: The Open Secret to LA's Success

That one that hit the easel? That's me on Vancouver.

[Portland Timbers v. Los Angeles Galaxy was one of three games I took in this weekend (on that, didn't go well). I'm trying to do better about writing up the empirical stuff.]

I wrote up Portland versus LA elsewhere, if mostly from the Timbers' point of view, but even that post was lousy with the central truth about LA: they are one hell of a sound defensive team. Small wonder, then, that they're crawling up the Western Conference standings, small wonder they're rocking a now-four-game winning streak. As noted in that post, LA has allowed three goals in their past eight games, a tally that pencils out to 0.375 goals per game. In other words, good.

Just 19 goals allowed so far, less than a goal a game. They have 34 goals for on the other side of the ledger; only five Major League Soccer teams have more...all of which rolls into a theme I'll discuss in the weekly post when that goes up – e.g. how very, very wrong I can sometimes be when I speak/write. Think I said something about LA "not being all that good" a couple weeks ago, and in a public, recorded forum, so, yeah...