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| Our shared lives.... |
After taking in the (condensed) Hell of the Portland Timbers’
midweek loss to Minnesota United FC, and then enduring the auto-erotic
asphyxiation gone wrong that Portland coughing up a late 2-2 draw to the Seattle
Sounders, a moment that made a mockery of a truly wonderful tifo, I have
several things to say/note, or that make me wanna go fetal…
First, see the title.
Second, I want to bury this idea about “bad defending,”
because I view that as a too-broad argument for a more specific phenomenon.
Generally speaking, the Timbers don’t defend badly as a unit, so much as they
keep making horrific, this-will-make-your-mother-hate-you mistakes in defense,
and, because they follow from bad decisions in the precise/specific/defining
moment, those kinds of fuck ups are harder to remedy. There, I’m talking about
Jeff Attinella coming off his line on Minnesota’s third goal and taking out not
one, but two defenders, or the way not one single player in Portland’s defense tracked
Clint “Fucking” Dempsey wandering into the space that opened up when all three
of Portland’s last-line defenders dropped off on Seattle’s equalizer…the line
was immaculate, then, if distinctly Maginot in nature and quality. Basically, the
problems seem based less on structure than bad decisions by individual players.
I’m not saying Portland’s defense doesn’t blow the
fundamentals from time to time – see the pocket that Christian Ramirez settles
in to score Minnesota’s second goal (yes, keeping a good line is fundamental) –
but everyone’s in some reasonable approximation of where they should be for Minnesota’s first (Okugo just got a bad touch, and the resulting own-goal; then
again, where’s the reaction to that overload?). The same goes for Joevin Jones’ opening goal on Sunday: Portland’s defenders were in decent position – and I’m
not saying that a couple player didn’t react like corpses (looking at you,
Alvas Powell, Lawrence Olum) – but, honestly, Jake Gleeson’s rebound went straight back into the natural progession of Jones' run, who didn’t so much follow up as found the ball
rolling lazily into his stride, and that’s just the gods tickling the odds in one
direction or the other. As suits their fancy, the whimsical bastards…
Bottom Line: set aside the details and Timbers fans get the
same outcome: every Timbers game now amounts to an exercise in anxiously turning
the crank on a Jack-in-the-Box and waiting for that fucker to pop and scare the
shit out of you/ruin your day.
