Timbers v FC Dallas Preview: Don't Stop...Believin' (Hold on to That FEE-eee-ling!)

Don't fuck with the Jesus...

With the Portland Timbers approaching the now-or-never moment of the season – and they just let a moment go last night – they’ve got FC Dallas coming to visit on Saturday. On the plus side, Dallas has by and large followed the same script – i.e., start strong, then.....fade away - that has dogged their entire history.

In a fun twist, they’ve turned that grand narrative into micro-narratives for their games lately. I’ll get to that below, but let’s start with the basics:

FC Dallas
Record/Basics: 9-7-9, 36 points, 6-3-3- home, 3-4-6 away; 33 gf, 26 ga, +7 goal differential
Last 10: LTLTTLTWWL (2-4-4, 1-2-2 home, 1-2-2 away; high side of middling)
Oppo: v VAN, @ ATX, @ LAFC, v MIA, @ HOU, v NYC, v ATX, @ RSL, v LAG, @ SEA

What We Know About Them
They’re perennial contenders for MLS’s most effective development/selling team – a model that has consequences for their consistency, obviously – but Dallas also serves as the stomping grounds for MLS 2022 MVP candidate, Jesus Ferreira, as well as another USMNT-bubble player, the indefatigable Paul Arriola. Matt Hedges, one of MLS most reliable long-term CBs, anchors a backline that, as evidenced by the numbers, doesn’t allow a ton of goals. The who’s who gets a little thin from there, but still includes Paxton Pomykal, the eternal Comeback-Player-of-Next Year (though he has had a decent run this season), and Timbers fans will recognize at least one right back, assuming the start him (Marco Farfan.

Notes on Recent Form
As repped in numerical form above, pretty shaky – and regardless of venue. Their schedule hasn’t been easy by any means – and the wins they posted (0-1 at Real Salt Lake, and a 2-1 home win over the Los Angeles Galaxy) had the added bonus of taking all the points from rivals – but a frisky, upwardly-mobile team gets more than a third of the points out of that stretch. That said, both wins came recently and the way Dallas rotated their starting XI at Seattle (pretty thoroughly) floats a plausible theory that they rested starters for the Timbers because they felt better about getting points against them (or, alternately, they saw Seattle as vulnerable (fairly, given their recent record) and gambled). In other words, they might have shaken off a bout of midsummer doldrums just in time to ruin a Rose City Saturday afternoon.

Portland Timbers 0-0 Sporting Kansas City: Touching the Ceiling

Welcome back, guys!

“Unbeaten in Nine”

Look, I’m happy about last night - if the performance more than the result - but I’m not having that shit. I pulled that from the official Portland Timbers webpage, so I get that Pravda-esque cheering comes natural, but “Unbeaten” isn’t good enough, not when it leaves two points on the table in consecutive home games. Basically, aim low enough and you risk shooting your damn foot. OK, enough of that.

Because I said “yes” to something I should have said “no” to, this review will necessarily be a little impressionistic. It’s not all a blur: for instance, I remember seeing “No. 32” for the Portland Timbers charge up the gut and asking the people around me at the bar, “Who is that? Is that Cascante?” only to see it was Marco Farfan ranging forward (from a more natural fullback position) and nearly stabbing home a goal. I also remember the name of the dude I introduced myself to after the game - for regular readers, this is the person I conversationally ambushed about a penalty kick last week. That thing where you repeat a name over and over until it sticks really does wonders for sufferers of CRS (that’s “Can’t Remember Shit”).

Farfan’s Foray (TM) didn’t make the highlights (I mean, what the fuck’s up with that? the kid had a moment), but the rest of them rang a bell when I saw them again (for the record, I have modified CRS; my memory works just fine if prompted correctly), and all the other prompts I have in front of me now confirm the same thing: the Timbers played pretty solid soccer in last night’s 0-0 draw at home against Sporting Kansas City. The game played out about the way you’d expect from two good, defensively-stout teams. Both sides found their chances, but they definitely had to look for them, and both sides contained the other’s biggest threats…again, take a bow, Marco Farfan (and welcome to the party, Modou Jadama).

I don’t have much to add about the game itself, but was instead going to move on to chatting about Portland’s game. That said, I just read the comments to the official recap, and I’m kind of glad I did, because it runs into the teeth of those comments. Loose suggestions of a “reorganized defense” come in and out of those (along with this question, which I very much second: “Are you really not considering Valentin a starter at this point?), and I guess I don’t get the premise. “Reorganized” from what?

To back up a little, seeing Lawrence Olum set a couple pre-game butterflies fluttering. He is, without question, a down-grade from Diego Chara (no offense intended, Larry), but Olum can play a role so long as you assign him a role he can play. That is, you’ll never get Chara’s manic herding dog dynamism from Olum, but he can clog the center and manage safe-not-spectacular distribution; playing him means resigning yourself to losing a little something on the attacking side, but, when you’ve got no choice…only the team does have a choice, and his name is Eryk Williamson, and I guess I’ll just leave it there. I don’t watch Timbers2 enough (or ever, I suppose) to make a case that Williamson should start over Olum, but that’ll remain an open question in this space till we get the real-world data to resolve it.

Portland Timbers 0-2 New York Red Bulls: Picking Through a (Meaningless) Mess

Timbers = All the people. And the pig. No winners.

Because there’s not a lot to say about the Portland Timbers 2-0 preseason loss to the New York Red Bulls, this won’t take long. In fact, I have only one real question to ask:

Yeah, yeah, this is preseason, but why did Portland look that much more like the team in preseason mode?

To speculate, it could have something to do with the strength/organizational integration of the Red Bulls’ academy; it’s also worth wondering whether Red Bulls II's 2016 (rather impressive looking) USL title lent them that telling little extra bit of coherence. The lesson from the former suggests that, maybe the Timbers organization ought to get crackin’ on its own academy. As for the later, yeah, Red Bulls II not only won last year’s USL title, they picked up 29 points more than Timbers 2 during the season.

As pointed out during the stream, New York could have won by 3-0, or even 4-0. Second stanza ‘keeper Kendall McIntosh probably played the biggest role in preventing that outcome. Overall, though, I found the incoherence mildly concerning at most, with a series of bad decisions, particularly at the back, nipping at its heels. More fundamentally, though, this is precisely why teams play preseason games – i.e., to, in in the spirit of Stumptown Footy’s title, to shake off the rust.