Portland Timbers 5-2 Club Peng...Puebla: (Hot) Summertime Rolls

It's okay, man. The view's groovy up here!

This will be short. I mean it this time. Stop it. Don’t look at me like that.

Watching the Portland Timbers lately has had the feeling of Wile E. Coyote looking down after running off the cliff and seeing nothing to hold him up. And yet he does not fall.

Getting into it…

Portland Timbers 5-2 Club Puebla
The Game, Very Briefly
I’d argue Puebla ran the opening 30 minutes, maybe even dominated the opening 20, even with Ariel Lassiter scoring a rare early one by finishing off Kristoffer Velde's punishment of Puebla's loose defense. Puebla didn't take long to equalize on a tap-in by Eduardo Mustre when the sum of Portland’s left lost equilibrium and Alex Bonetig sat out the play. They shelled the Timbers’ area from the same side around the 28th minute, pressing a sustained attack better than Portland would manage until…I’d say the 38th minute. Once David Da Costa’s tap-dance poke flicked the ball past Ricardo Gutierrez for the Timbers’ third goal, the game ended both in fact and spirit.

Per the dictates of math, Portland scored one goal in between all that – on Cole Bassett glancing home the go-ahead goal after getting ahead of Puebla's entire defense – but Da Costa’s goal put a stamp on the game the other two merely suggested. Puebla spent the opening 25 minutes (at least) coursing through and around Portland’s defensive shape, only for the Timbers to break out – through Velde most often, at least early – and score goals. Da Costa’s goal stood up the argument that anything Puebla could do in Portland’s end ultimately wouldn’t matter. Once Puebla’s players had the space behind them in their minds every time they passed the ball, the wheels came off.

Club America 1-1 Portland Timbers, Then a "Loss": Penalties & Positivity

Make that pass again, Felipe. I'm waiting...

Take it. Take your meaningless, non-regulation, asterisk-weighted win, Club America. It means nothing, not even to you.

Oh, and stopping the game to put a lid on “discriminatory chants”? Sign me up for an all-day pass on that shit…and if I could come up with a functional way to punish a team for one of their shithead fans pointing a laser into a goalkeeper’s eyes during a penalty shootout, I’d do it tomorrow. Too easy to game, sadly. At any rate…

Club America 1-1 Portland Timbers; 5-(maybe)4 in penalties
About the Game
I can’t remember the last time I saw the Timbers counter-punch so cleanly. David Da Costa clipped a ripe peach of an assist off the outside of his right to send Ariel Lassiter clean through for Portland’s opening goal, but Felipe Mora’s chest-trap, reverse through-ball to Juan David Mosquera set my nether to fluttering and they still haven’t calmed down (might be in here). Sure, Mosquera pissed it away with a touch long enough for the record books, but the sweet, sweet memory still titillates.

America took over the rest of the first half and, factually, had more to show for it than I recalled (e.g., 7 shots, 2 on goal, with healthy side of corner kicks), but the Timbers defended stoutly and well (hold that thought) – up to and including Jimer Fory retreating behind an extended Maxime Crepeau to clip a(n offside) shot clear (also, remember him foundly, for…)

I didn’t see Fory’s first yellow card – heard it was something about dissent, and there’s this whole chicken-egg thesis waiting to be written about refs and their thin skin – but no decent ref gives a second yellow for the foul he committed, and yet…the Aristocrats! When the theretofore largely hapless America scored an equalizer off their 19th nervous corner (reference/gotta step there, Mr. Felipe Mora), all signs pointed to the wheels spinning off into outer orbit for the Timbers. Without dipping too far to over-determining, I credit Phil Neville for making a couple smart subs for breaking from depth – Kevin Kelsy for a reasonably overwhelmed Mora and Antony for a drifting Da Costa – and it just took a combination of holding on defensively and scaring America off throwing every player, plus a couple asshole fans, to carry the Timbers to one-third of a loss, instead of a full one.

Portland Timbers 1-0 Queretaro FC: The Joy of Feeling Things & Other Notes

Leagues Cup, in human form.

I don’t know much about Love Island, but I am familiar with the thing where the show throws a bunch of hot new singles into the mix.

That approximates my annual experience with Leagues Cup: a bunch of strangers dropping in to the familiar, interpretable world of the MLS regular season, thereby detouring into some wacky side quest. And it only means something to the team/couple that walks away with the trophy, whether in metal or human form.

Portland Timbers 1-0 Queretaro FC
About the Game
When halftime rolled around and the broadcast got to showing the first half highlights, they started with a wildly overcooked cross that capped one of the rare competent attacking sequences managed by either team. They had a goal to show, of course – a bumbler scored by Cristhian Paredes through a thicket of flailing legs and falling bodies (and that link may or may not take you to it) – but the final stats speak to how little happened before and after. Jonathan Perlaza got sent off for a foul and a fit just before the halftime whistle and that left nothing but the struggle to stay awake through the second half.

Near as I can tell, Queretaro came to defend and without any form of an actionable Plan B. The 0.3 xG awarded to them in the official line matches the eye test…wish I could say the same about the 1.6 they handed Portland, because that would have hit like Red Bull and Everclear compared to what I watched.

That’s all I have on the game and I’ve already exhausted my knowledge of Queretaro. Now, to entertain some, but not all of the thoughts I had as I watched. [Ed. – The Plan is to pare the thoughts down to five for all future posts – and the length of the posts along with ‘em.]

MLS Week 26: (Loose) Notes on the Re-Entry & Laying Down Some Markers

WHAT IS HAPPENING?!? (Japanese game show, btw)

I didn’t watch nearly as much Leagues Cup as I’d wanted to (a single tear rolls fitfully down my cheek as I type) and for reasons I can’t quite put words to. I watched a good share of highlights, did the requisite oohing and awing over the prettier goals, but the sense that what happened there doesn’t translate to Major League Soccer’s regular season in any comprehensible way crept in somewhere around the time my Portland Timbers got a St. Louis shove out of the tournament in the Round of 32.

No small part of that follows from the Leagues Cup format itself. The three-team, two-game group stages makes for a weird/unforgiving format, for one – e.g., the Colorado Rapids and the San Jose Earthquakes qualified for the Round of 32 with 0-1-1 records, while Minnesota United FC and Real Salt Lake failed to qualify on 1-1-0 records – and that the Liga MX teams haven’t really started their season and also play a total of zero games at home gives even the shakiest MLS teams a leg up in one-off games…

…not that that stopped me from poring over the results, clocking who lost to who, and when, and running that against the…possibly eccentric document I created to track results, also it’s not me, I’m not losing my goddamn mind, because the Form Guide doesn't get the damn visuals right.

At any rate, with games of MLS Week…26 now playing on the streaming service that lives in your TV, I wanted to reconnect with where the regular season left off and what, if anything, the Leagues Cup said about where it may go between today and Decision Day. The observations below lean more into trends than details (i.e., no, I didn’t know about that minor knock that may make [Team X’s] your home team’s second stream (high potential!) No. 8 play a little south of his best), and it mostly kicks around loose impressions to be confirmed by later results, aka, the immovable facts that decide the fate of all and sundry. As stated in, I’m just trying to wrap my head around some things to get back in touch with what I’m watching.

This starts with an Eastern Conference overview, but will wrap up on how I’m feeling about the Timbers’ chances after the Leagues Cup. With that, let’s roll…

St. Louis CITY FC 3-1 Portland Timbers: A Loss and the Rest of the Season

Never, ever forget: the pig enjoys it.

I sat on posting this for a number of reasons – everything from still mulling it over to feeling like I didn’t have anything to say beyond, “say, that didn’t go well,” to feeling like a carcass Saturday morning – but the primary reason I took a breath for putting up a post about the Portland Timbers' 1-3 loss at St. Louis CITY (wNbc!) FC was this: I thought they played reasonably well given the givens…

…the secondary reason was a plan to shift to weekly, more context-rich posts (we’ll see how that goes). At any rate…

I took the usual time to tip through the subreddits – e.g., posts about how hard (and deep) Portland sucks on the road, how hard the defense shits the sheets, how everything would have been better had Evander not limped off…let’s go with disturbingly early (no low-hanging updates on that, btw) – and all those arguments and talking points make enough sense. And yet…

“Combative; looks like a foul-free war”

“midfield/middle of field, total melee”

Those rhyming phrases slipped into the notes I took during the game, 60 minutes apart. Between that and re-reading my post from Portland’s goal-less draw at St. Louis earlier this season, this Leagues Cup tilt delivered the game I expected. St. Louis disrupts more than they play, which makes them hell to play through: “forcing turnovers in advantageous places” (aka, pig-wrestling) has made them the MLS team they are today, for good (2023!) or ill (2024! probably!). Sure, Portland struggled to connect passes, but what is that but the whole damn point of that approach?

And, yes, any fan wants to see his/her/their local team play through that – but that’s exactly where I took comfort in the loss. Portland created enough chances to win – they even had two bites at scoring first (e.g., Juan David Mosquera somewhere around the 30th and Jonathan Rodriguez’s how-the-fuck-did-that-guy-miss chance at the back post (has to be in here, right?) – but they didn’t make them count. In defense of anyone ripping his/her/their hair about how few total chances Portland created, the official stats put a very real cap on how hard I can push back on that point, but the Timbers could have ridden Claudio Bravo’s gods-kissed banger to a draw, but for…well, St. Louis doing something like the same.

Club Leon 1-2 Portland Timbers: What You Learn & What Applies

Not tonight, not today, potato, pot-ah-to

I’m not going to dig too deep in the Portland Timbers late, glorious 2-1 win over Club Leon in Leagues Cup play tonight, mostly on the grounds that there’s not much to carry over between Leagues Cup and the MLS regular season…or is there?

Very Brief Summary
Leon looked set to make the 1-0 lead they laid down at the 12th minute hold up all night (also, helluva shot) – i.e., they collapsed on 50/50 balls fast enough to turn them into 60/40s, the Timbers struggled to play into their defensive third like a mime doing the wind bit, and they couldn’t really get so much going.

By my estimation, three players – Eryk Williamson (who had some redeeming to do), Dario Zuparic, and Antony – gave a hearty “not tonight!” to all that, and in that order. When they stepped forward, the rest of the team followed and they collectively started to punch out of the semi-defensive crouch suggested by Phil Neville’s line-up. They brought back the 50/50s, generally let Leon know they had a battle on their hands, if not a game. As the minutes ticked above 60, the Timbers took Leon out of their game.

It didn’t come together all at once, but it didn’t really have to. Without hazarding a guess at the actual game-plan, starting The Millers, Eric and Zac, on either side of Zuparic and Zac McGraw, screamed “just don’t fuck up.” Leon put the Timbers in plenty of jeopardy - more in the first half than the second (highlights!) - but they gave the Timbers heck over the first 10 minutes or so of the second too - but the rotations came through and Maxime Crepeau cleaned things up every time they didn’t. All that brings me to a phrase in my notes:

“highly episodic game”

At the 58th minute, Leon held an eleven-to-three advantage on shots. Some better than others, to be sure, but that impression of each team’s output tracked as roughly correct. In a live demonstration of how and why this result turned to Portland’s favor, the Timbers cut Leon’s advantage to eleven-to-six shots fired just two minutes later, courtesy of a flurry of them that started when Felipe Mora corralled a ball over the top, cut inside, found Evander, and sat poised to be the proud father of a succession of tertiary assist. The Timbers could only punch through here and there, basically, but, at that point, they'd already had their decisive moment just over 17 minutes earlier when Zac McGraw leveled the game with a perfect placement header off a corner kick. 

Portland Timbers 0-1 Monterrey: Why Do Birds Suddenly Appear?

Feelin' it. (With due and necessary innocence.)

The Portland Timbers started yesterday’s Leagues Cup Round of 32 game in a defensive posture so deep and passive that I worried Gio Savarese had them out with specific and deliberate orders to defend first, second, and third, so long as the situation demanded it. When Monterrey commenced to camp in Portland’s half over the first five minutes of the game...well, I’ll speak for myself here, but I was already writing the first couple sentences of this post, nearly all of which centered on how I made peace with an 0-3 loss.

When the final whistle blew, Portland had conceded just one goal – one that, to continue the record from the alternative universe of doom and sadness, followed from a cascade of errors, many from the unlikeliest of suspects (e.g., and in order, Zac McGraw, Diego Chara and Claudio Bravo) – and they came within one late, great chance by Dario Zuparic of sending the game to penalty kicks (see the official highlights, surely). That wasn’t to be, sadly and dammit, because the Portland Timbers lost the game 0-1 to (from what I gather) Mexican titans, Monterrey.

That’s not what the post is about. It’s about how the game we all actually watched started about 14 minutes in.

After surviving those opening five minutes, the Timbers played straight to Monterrey’s end the first time they got on the ball. Franck Boli, in particular, became a channel-running pest: on two occasions between the 10th and 15th minutes, he received the ball and, after flummoxing a defender or two with as many cuts and feints, he fired shots that sailed just wide of Monterrey’s goal. His second shot rolled close enough to the right post for them to decide they couldn’t risk him firing a third, so a couple Monterrey defenders chopped him down before he could fire it. The entire stadium wailed for a foul (rightly so), but none was given (Leagues Cup, man; different set of rules) and Monterrey, now on the ball, launched a counter up their right.

Monterrey’s man – was it Maximiliano Meza or Stefan Medina? – almost reached the halfway line before Diego Chara 1) reclaimed the ball and clattered him clean to Providence Park’s (possibly cancerous) turf, and 2) signaled with the volume of a siren and the brightness of 100 flares fired simultaneously that Portland came to play yesterday, and with a very real amount of belief.