Seattle Sounders 3(2)-3(4) Portland Timbers: Love Hangover

It's on me, guys. @ me.

I can’t remember whether I wrote it or tweeted it – and I’m not about to find it - but sometime in the very recent past I said that I never needed to see Dairon Asprilla in a Timbers uniform again. Yes, that sentiment resides at the intersection of harsh and ruthless, and you can go ahead and call me a bastard for it, but, obviously, 1,000 erotic poets banging away on 1,000 typewriters and stoned on “molly” could not express my appreciation for the man and his works in last night’s absolutely fucking glorious victory over the Seattle Sounders. In Seattle. Just…savor it. I re-watched the highlights just now and I want a gif of the little dance Asprilla did after slamming the winning penalty kick past “The Dread” Stefan Frei for Christmas.

While I’m in the business of giving shout-outs to Timbers I’ve recently crapped on, I want to single out/salute Andy Polo for setting the tone at “never-say-die-motherfucker” over the match’s opening 20 minutes. Until Jair Marrufo pulled him aside for a little chat, Polo played like he wanted to fight not just the Sounders starting eleven, but every last one of the 40,000 Sounders fans in attendance.

I’ll close out the introductions with a nod to Marrufo, who let both teams play in a way that was brave, even gutsy, and fair. No quarter was asked, and no quarter was given between the teams and credit to Marrufo for toeing what could have been a damned precarious line.

Getting into the usual (or sometimes?) fine-tooth combing over tactics, goals, or game states feels misplaced, like talking about the brush strokes of a beautiful painting instead of stepping back to appreciate the whole thing. Another factor: with all the goals came late in the match, I couldn’t remember half of them (aka, around the time “the root kicked in”); factually, I couldn’t remember even one of Seattle’s goals this morning* and, given my understanding of how trauma works, that’s something. Asprilla’s headed goal, on the other hand, somehow set up permanent, immovable residency in my mind, like one of those “core memories” in Inside Out.

(* Having now relived them – this one and this one, in particular – God bless the root and keep it holy. The intensity of…just everything swallowed up the sheer awfulness of the mistakes involved. Holy shit, how’d the Timbers get out of there alive?)

Diana Ross recorded a song called “Love Hangover” back when, and that’s very much part of my personal hangover collection this morning. Sounders head coach Brian Schmetzer called this “the most painful loss of my career.” Coming at the experience from the opposite side, this goes down as my favorite all-time Timbers victory. Yes, even more than winning MLS Cup in 2015.

This morning, I am sloppy with happiness.

There were moments of doubt last night – none more sticky and ominous than the goal Raul Ruidiaz scored that would have put the Sounders through to the Western Conference finals. I worried that the Timbers had spent too much time absorbing waves of Sounders attacks; I wasn’t sure the team could re-orient to punching back, not just on the road and in that particular stadium. As they did when they went down a goal in the first leg, the Timbers clapped back just 10 minutes later. The gloom and anxiety never had time to settle.

Along the same lines, the way Portland opened the game made little room for doubt. They back four defended lustily, winning just about every battle they were called on to fight; I’ll admit that Alvas Powell scared the holy living shit out of me here and there, but he held up, Jorge Villafana put out at least two fires that threatened to rage, and both Liam Ridgewell and Larrys Mabiala won a little place in my heart forever. Every Timbers player on the field dusted himself off every time he got knocked down and was back in the fight seconds later. I’m fully aware of how over-the-top all this reads, but this is as good an occasion for hyperbole as any I’ve experienced. Just freaking incredible.

In one my preview tweets yesterday, I wrote something about how the Timbers wouldn’t be where they are without the players who held the team together when the starters were down. And that’s why I want to close this mash-note with Andres Flores. I don’t think any player on the field played as many shitty passes as Flores did; in the attacking third, especially, “wayward” charitably describes the worst of his passes. All the same, Flores is a dude one season out of the NASL and last night he played in one of the biggest games in the Timbers’ MLS history, and with 40,000 people watching and willing him to fuck up. (In a moment of clarity last night, I finally understood why the crowd really matters; took me 40+ years; I’m slow.) Flores held it together. The whole damn team did, and that’s magical.

The Portland Timbers needed every player on its roster last night, just as they did all season long. I know I’ll be back to calling out players and putting sharp questions to their personal livelihoods. And, yeah, that makes me a bit of a bastard. This morning, though, I want to buy every man on the team a drink, one of those big colorful fancy ones with garnishes and novelty umbrellas, the whole damn nine-yards. Hit me up, guys. There’s room on my credit card.

C&C Daily: On the MLS Conference Finals, Jurgen and Bruce

To think, it was there all along and we never saw it.

Interested parties can find a programming note down below, but I’ll just jump in…with regrets for

The Conference Finals

First, the Major League Soccer Conference Finals kick off in just over an hour (good time to post, dumbass), and it’s about damn time. I have only the briefest of notes on either match up.

Regarding Montreal Impact v. Toronto FC: I don’t think Montreal will be able to do to Toronto what they did to the Philadelphia Union and, in particular, the New York Red Bulls. The climax of the regular season laid bare both teams’ capacity for defensive lapses, which only left it to Montreal to expose them, with Ignacio Piatti tugging at the drawstrings. Toronto will/should be better balanced, and they’ve got Jozy Altidore (who has been good and is always large and strong) and Sebastian Giovinco pressing matters on the other end, but that’s why they play the games, right? To see how things pan out?

As for Seattle Sounders v. Colorado Rapids, I’m expecting the Rapids to bunker, especially over Leg 1. If Seattle can’t break ‘em down – and this could be without Jordan Morris available – the Sounders will just become another patsy for the trick that the Rapids have pulled all season long…

…and, like all good Portland Timbers fans, I’m hoping they do it, even as it will mean me struggling to stay interested in/awake over the fourth straight hour of soccer I watch tonight. It would have been that little bit cooler if Shkelzen Gashi wasn’t Shkelzen Gimpy, but the thing that happened to his ankle happened to his ankle, so…it’s all down to Sebastian Le Toux?

MLS Post-Season Handicapping. And a Little Mockery

Forgot the watermelon, motherfucker...

"....every team in @MLS has at least 10 losses. Never happened before."
- The Armchair Analyst, tweet, 10/19/2015

I'm fairly certain that I've argued IRL that 2015 has been one of Major League Soccer's weirder, more mediocre seasons; for all I know, I said the same somewhere in this site's archive. Whatever, it points to a deeper reality about MLS – i.e. that this league only rarely produces great teams. With allowances for argument, here's the short list: DC United's original (and slow-starting) team, or the Chicago Fire's first, Eastern-European-kissed outfit; the Houston Dynamo put together a consistent team, if not a great one, for a couple years' domination in the mid-aughts; a couple New England Revolution teams graced the same era by playing "Beautiful Losers"; one could also throw in the Columbus Crew's "Touch o' Argentina" '08 outfit (bit of a stretch; good team, though), or the exquisitely-balanced Real Salt Lake team that roared straight outta Sandy, Utah to become one of the league's steadiest sides until, oh, this weird 2015. There's probably a great Los Angeles Galaxy team in there, but fuck those guys. (OK, yes, goddammit; they're the pace-setters for MLS till further notice.)

A closer look at each of those clubs, and what they accomplished in the relevant seasons, would probably wipe some kind of smudge over their shine, but let's enjoy their memories even if we have to embellish a little.

This season, though. 2015? It's worse than a crap-shoot. It's just plain crap, albeit with a good collection of highlights in person and game-form. Overall, the quality presents less a spectacle of sporting excellence than asking fans to watch 20 teams try to haul an oiled-up watermelon to the top of a mud-pile. And that mud-pile is pretty fucking oiled up, too. Matt Doyle's tweet, quoted above forwards the spirit of the argument: whichever club wins MLS Cup at the end of this hillbilly wrasslin' fest won't brag too long, nor answer too loudly when asked about the latest, or even new, star that hangs over his club's crest...then again, me being me, I'd cherish the Portland Timbers winning MLS Cup this weird year that little bit more. I love all my chilluns', and the challenging ones a little more...

Speaking of the Timbers, here's something worth pointing out: the fan-base is restless (or it could be that my personal, most direct sample is demanding and fidgety?). Even if they can't agree on what changes to make, it/they generally want changes made to a team that's widely viewed as a couple steps behind good enough. To be clear, I am not casting aspersions here; go back through the archives of this thing and you will know petulance (see the time I had "nothing but contempt" for the club; yep, hissy fit; and yet it came in the most parental thing I've ever posted about the Timbers). Besides, what's so wrong about wanting the club that you ask Jesus to look after when you're signing off at night to be all of what they can be?

Portland's Drunk-Strewn Path to the After Party: On Faith and Its Opposites

Cherished. Pointless.

I posted a piece a couple nights ago about how Darlington Nagbe presents as the most likely savior for this manic-depressive (if medication-modulated) 2015 season (reference to meds acknowledges that the highs haven't been that high, nor the lows that low – more later). The argument for this is messy and, as it turns out, large. Real, real large. To put that another way, nothing that comes below will clear the tangles cited in the title.

Nagbe played a good game this past Saturday. The dead-end dribbles made their usual cameo, but Nagbe put a pair of thoroughly respectable shots on goal; that's on top of playing in Lucas Melano for the Portland Timbers' best attacking sequence on the night, a good shift for anyone. And yet, as all Timbers fans know, none of those three efforts, or any of the others, went in.  As noted in that same post, this is the sum of Portland's season. With Nagbe, specifically, impressive moments, even relevant statistics, don't matter against the broadly well-justified, oft-repeated knock on Nagbe: what good is all that game-changing talent if it fails to actually change the game?

I've carried image at right (and above) in my mind for about a month. I have a collector friend or two, the kind of guys who buy their favorite toys twice, one to play with and the other to save in pristine, packaged condition for a presumed later payoff. The investment piece pans out sometimes, but, other times, it ends with nothing but a grown man carting around kid's toys embarrassingly deep into adulthood. Even with his reputation taking hits (like this one!), Portland still possesses one of the most coveted toys in all Major League Soccer. Nagbe had one visibly great season (see 2013), one that had Timbers fans dreaming/drooling about future seasons. What we got instead were the past two seasons, which shifted the whole goddamn mess back to potential. It's as if some shady collector stuffed our Darlington back in the original packaging and shoved him back on the shelf for everyone to admire for...I dunno. By which I mean, I just don't know. What I do know is that I was always the kind of kid who ripped that toy straight out of the packaging because, honestly, the fuck's the point of a toy if you don’t play with it?

That same image was to top one of the most vicious hit-pieces to ever percolate up from the fetid sink of doubt and worry that bubbles in the depths of my body. The plan was to tick through each position on the Timbers line up and list the players from around the league – that is, just within MLS – that I rate higher than each player on Portland's roster. Look, I love these players and absolutely want them to succeed, but only two struck me as hard to shift in the end – Diego Chara and Nat Borchers. So, yeah, ugly post borne of ugly thoughts and, yep, Nagbe inspired it. And yet I can still call him Portland's likeliest savior. When it comes to questions of faith and certainty, Hamlet has nothing on me...