FC Dallas 1-1 Portland Timbers: Better.

Dallas translated through bowling.

After a season that has started with what can only be called incompetence – which, at times came in the flaming variety - it felt pretty damn good to see the Portland Timbers achieve the opposite in yesterday’s 1-1 draw at FC Dallas.

Over the Timbers’ first five games of the season, I had to dig at least shoulder-deep into the barrel to pick out good performances. Zac McGraw’s name has come up in most games – take a bow, young man – Dario Zuparic almost as much, but the list has generally been short, allergic to padding and concentrated in the defense. The larger problems, not to mention the outright failures, have come at the collective level – i.e., players, even league legends (see, Chara, Diego) looking shaky playing the ball forward and an attack grabasstic up to the point of mutual incomprehensibility. Hope walked lightly on the land, in other words; outside of a couple promising starts that only felt more heartbreaking by promising more, her feet may have never even touched the ground.

Weighed against such a lowly level, the Timbers knocked it out of the park in Dallas yesterday. Without declaring this draw an actual turn-around, and with a full acknowledgement of the final score duly acknowledged, I’m content to call Portland’s first (more or less) quality game of 2023 a kind of win.

For all that, Dallas tends to offer a shifting yardstick. I noted in the preview that people rarely rate them as a contender and games like this get at why. They struggle to string together good results, which means they struggle to generate real, season-shaping momentum. Now, had Jesus Jimenez not strayed offside, thereby cancelling out the insurance goal/tap-in that Alan Velasco scored almost immediately after Dallas went ahead after Facundo Quignon made good on three minutes of pressure and as many corner kicks in the 74th, I feel confident saying that Portland would have been, in fact, fucked. So, yeah, Portland caught a break or two. Moreover, there was more than a little but for the divine (delighfully pissy) grace of Aljaz “All the Jazz” Ivacic, because the Timbers’ defense gave Dallas several cracks at both go-ahead and insurance goals...and gods only know why Portland would start anyone but Ivacic anytime he’s available at this point. If you haven’t seen some of his saves, do yourself some good and make your heart a little bigger by dipping into the highlights from this one.

Toronto FC 1-2 FC Cincinnati: I Have Seen Your Product And I'd Like to Purchase It

A visual of the game plan.

When Toronto FC started catching up to FC Cincinnati’s mildly auspicious start, I’ll confess to it: yes, I started to doubt the program again. Watching them pass through Cincy one line at a time over and over made them look likelier to take charge and, as the minutes passed, put increasing pressure of Cincinnati’s…let’s call it non-ideal center back pairing of Ian Murphy and Nick Hagglund.

And then, like a script from one of those Hollywood movies, a good one like Rudy, Hagglund and Murphy combined to put FC Cincinnati up 1-0 just before the ref’s whistle called the end of the first half.

With that in mind, you start to re-think what you watched in the second half: the palpable disappointment from Toronto’s broadcast booth gets louder - “they got to play faster,” they said, “they’re not moving Cincinnati’s defenders around enough” - and, little by little (only in the opposite direction), it dawns on you that Cincy just managed the first half of a road game, and well enough that Toronto’s attack - which had averaged 2.6 goals per game in the five games prior (said average got a bump last weekend, fwiw) - rarely got close enough to apply pressure on Murphy and Hagglund. (And then you wake up the next morning to watch the highlights, because you’re not sure if you forgot something, and that confirms the above - e.g., that Toronto only fired a couple of shots from range in that first half). And then the second half started…

Toronto’s sloppiness hurt them throughout the first half; every ball that slipped behind a smart run slowed them down and allowed Cincinnati time to get that usefully spongy defense stacked right. The problem started at their back-line, particularly in the person of Carlos Salcedo…and have I mentioned that Toronto’s Chris Mavinga limped off in the middle of the first half, because that might be relevant. At any rate and early in the second half, one of Salcedo’s stray passes rolled over the touch-line in Toronto’s defensive third. It didn’t seem like a big deal, even after Cincinnati’s Alvas Powell set up for a long throw because and, you know, how often do those work? Then, lo and behold (and who’d they pay to make it happen?), Powell’s throw-in looped over the heads of two, three Toronto defenders and falls straight to the foot of Luciano Acosta. One second and two touches later, the ball bulged the side of Alex Bono’s net. 2-0 Cincinnati.