FC Dallas 2-1 Portland Timbers: The Big Picture Meets the Little One

Her soul's somewhere in there...

As anyone who tracks this blog or follows me on Bluesky knows, I’ve made a mantra of the argument that regular season games don’t matter in Major League Soccer. Today, I’d like to amend and extend that case into something more clarifying.

To be clear, the original argument still holds up. Any team that gets its shit together far enough ahead of Decision Day has the potential to get on a streak, get into the MLS Cup Playoffs and make some noise, maybe even snatch MLS Cup from a team that, based on their performance over the entire season, deserves it a little more. Thank gods the Supporters’ Shield still rewards that, no matter how little people value it.

The amendment/extension piece comes from something else, something that only stepped out of the background over the Portland Timbers’ past several struggling seasons. Upon reviewing their results, I started to notice the only teams Portland could beat were the ones either below the playoff line, or those slipping toward the wrong side of it. That is, the Timbers could only beat actually bad teams, or teams in bad form. Any time Portland played a team with even a little more than half of anything going on, two points or all three slipped away. I think my obsession with tracking results came before that, but this cemented the value of the exercise for me.

It’s not a perfect scale by any means. A crap team can beat a good team on any given day, of course, and even the best team can crap the bed. The thing to watch for is the persistence of the phenomenon – i.e., any season that sees your team reliably lose to the good teams deep enough into the regular season is a good one to give up on. It doesn’t mean they won’t make the playoffs – see the Timbers’ 2024 and 2025 seasons (on second thought, only look at the searing dead end of 2024 if you’re one of those freaks that watches replays of compound fractures…sicko) – it just means they will not make the final, they probably won’t even make the quarters, and they’re just the fodder on some other teams’ path to glory.

FC Dallas 2-0 Portland Timbers: Another Bad Thing Happened in Texas

My personal wingman broods...

The vibes have been good around the Portland Timbers’ over the past few weeks. The dance between player and ball looked more natural and the defense tightened into a none (or few) shall pass knot. It felt real enough, but the idea that some of that improvement came from playing rusty Liga MX teams bubbled under every Leagues Cup broadcast.

In other words, I was looking forward to seeing Portland get back to the MLS regular season. I really was.

FC Dallas 2-0 Portland Timbers
The Game, Still More Briefly
Portland gave up two shit goals – though the first was worst of the two by far(, Mr. Crepeau…has even one of his haters thought to call him "Maximum Crapeau”?) – and didn’t do shit on the attacking end. To be clear, I could end this section right here and still have everything pretty much covered, but, to continue…

Pointing to what went wrong on the defensive side is easy as Pin the Tail on the Donkey without the blindfold, but untangling why every Timber appeared to get the vapors on entering the attacking third takes a little picking. Despite the reported (fucking crazy) heat, Portland’s players shifted around more than usual when they had the ball, not necessarily a well-oiled machine, but at least it moved. Dallas countered by either or both ceding possession (to the tune of 40/60) or/and dropping the defensive line deep enough that it always had the game in front of it. On a better day, maybe Portland finds one another and, from there, some decent openings; on Saturday, too many players looked like they wanted to take back every pass immediately after making it. Their best moments came when Antony broke from the depths to the surface, but that only happened (I think) twice, and David Da Costa taking a crack at finishing off one of those, then firing a strong shot from a fair distance (both probably made the highlight reel, but I'm way, way behind; also, a clip of the second goal; just terrible marking, see?).

That pretty well covers the attack Dallas had to “survive” and they just had to make the most of their shots from there. Without claiming expertise on the subject, this struck me as a typical FC Dallas performance – i.e., they don’t create a lot of chances and rely on their defense to see that the opposition doesn’t get many more. Last night’s three points lifts them closer to the play-in spots, but that hasn’t served them so good in 2025; 11th in still 11th. They do have some real quality pieces – e.g., Petar Musa’s a damn good forward (and would thrive on a better team) and Sebastien Ibeagha has aged well – and Logan Farrington, who I’ve seen play well, made a strong argument for The Man Behind The Man of the Match (The Vice-Man of the Match? The Wingman of the Match?), but they don’t have the same quality of player in every position and, as follows, feel incomplete as a team.