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| Two men enter, one man leaves. And keeps the bird. |
Had you asked me when I went to bed last night about the
side of the field Diego Valeri was on when he scored his penalty kick, I would
have said the far side. Had someone disagreed with that, I would have said, “Well,
guess there’s only one way to settle this,” and rolled up my sleeves for some
deadly-serious arm wrestling.
And yet, I would have been completely wrong. Valeri scored
his penalty kick right in front of me. Portland would score four more running
toward my seats – Fanendo Adi surged straight toward my seats (if a little
under them) when he made his second-half stoppage-time solo raid – but,
overall, I lost the hell out of the sense of when just about everything
happened in last night's 5-1 win for Portland (just linking to full highlights for now; I'll get links to individual goals up later/probably). In case it’s not clear in the above, my sense of timing
would have meant that Valeri scored his penalty kick in the first half.
But Portland scored just one goal in the first half, that
ugly, blessed thing by Lawrence Olum poked over Minnesota’s ‘keeper John
Alvbage. It might not have been the prettiest goal (OK, no, it was ugly), but
it came as a hell of a relief, right? What’s better than an early goal to
soothe doubts and calm the jitters?
The way the time-line slipped up has the subtle, secondary
meaning: that Portland always looked more or less in control of the game. Between
the way my memory works and all the dumb ways I handicap it, most games live in
my head as a series of events; sometimes they’re linear, but most often they’re
not. For instance, for last night’s game, I never lost track of the fact that
Portland scored five goals and that, at some point, Minnesota United FC (wow,
that’s the first time I mentioned them?) pulled back a goal. That’s the salient
detail – that Portland always had the lead – so the sequence doesn’t matter…or at
least that’s what I tell myself so I don’t start asking too many questions
about how things are working upstairs. (Where did you put my memory pills, Judy?
Randall can’t find them.)
The other thing that didn’t work last night – and this was a
bit of a surprise – was Minnesota’s defense. There will always be the question
of what leads to any given goal, whether it’s attacking brilliance of defensive
idiocy, and I think Portland’s second goal (and the winner) offers up a good
case for dissection. While it’s true on the one hand that Portland maneuvered the
ball smartly into Minnesota’s final third – the way Alvas Powell played the
ball into Adi with his back to goal, and Sebastian Blanco shifted into acres of
space outside, where Adi found him for the (inch-perfect) cross to Valeri (who
really seems to like scoring with his head this year) – it’s no less true that,
on the other hand, Minnesota’s defense didn’t rotate anyone out to Blanco until
it was far, far too late.
