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| Is safe, comrade. |
I’ll start with my post-match analysis of MLS Cup 2018: the Portland
Timbers lost.
What? Matchday Central never put up a...but…fine.
To start, I didn’t mind the way the Portland Timbers
approached MLS Cup; the coaching staff actually impressed me a little. They set
the line of confrontation higher than I expected, but that worked out, at least
until a goal forced them to chase the game. Prior to that, Portland did a good
job keeping Atlanta United FC in front of them. I hadn’t looked at the box
score till now and…wow, that’s a balanced game, even to the point of equilibrium.
Well, everywhere else but the score sheet. And that’s how you lose a game,
people.
Here’s the thing with the last game of a season: there isn’t
much to say beyond who won and who lost. No matter how feverishly the players
itch for that shot a redemption, the next game won’t come till the next season.
And what happened was really simple: Portland let in two crap goals, both of
them dismal two-steppers. The broadcast team lamented the heavy touch by Jeremy
Ebobisse on the first goal, but it was Ebobisse’s search for a better pass that
slowed him down long enough for Michael Parkhurst (dude, not the fastest) to
pick the ball off his toe. Parkhurst’s tackle left nothing between Josef
Martinez and Portland’s yawning goal but Liam Ridgewell’s failure to stick all
the way in. In a bit of cosmic unfairness, Ridgewell starred again on the second goal, this time by losing track of Josef “Single-Season-Fucking-Scoring-Record”
Martinez, who would knock a header to a streaking Franco Escobar at the back
post, aka, the guy Jorge Villafana lost. Two massive two-step mistakes, two goals, and
the rest of it becomes what might have been – e.g., what if Ebobisse powered
the ball across the goal instead of cushioning the deflection too near Atlanta ‘keeper,
Brad Guzan? Had the Timbers leveled the score four-five minutes after Atlanta’s
opener, who knows what might have been?
I fretted a little theatrically over Ebobisse’s mental state
in a since-deleted tweet, but that’s misplaced nonsense because good players
learn from mistakes. We’ll see how he handles this one, not just next season,
but over the next couple; that’ll drop the relevant hints on Ebobisse’s
ceiling. On that, Ridgewell had a bad night, an unfortunate capper on a season
where he’d shown the mental resilience of three men by swallowing a benching
and surviving an injury to become a key steadying influence during the MLS Cup
run. How far did he climb in my mind: a trip down memory lane revealed that I’d
written Ridgewell out of the team’s script somewhere in the middle of the
season (Game 17, as it happens). The man enjoyed a side of redemption with his solid season, basically.
