Houston Dynamo FC 3-2 Portland Timbers & MLS Week 4 in Review: Of Daggers and DPs

Don't google images of Underoos 

Major League Soccer’s Week 4 handed me a tidy little theme and for that I am thankful. That could be me trying to squeeze a big idea into the Underoos I wore as a wee man, but I’m guessing it will resonate in both directions and in a tone that every MLS fanbase will hear and appreciate it. Unbelievably, that’s it for the preamble. Maybe I should start saying yes to every home improvement project, if only to spare everyone who finds this site from reading an Adrien Brody speech every time they click through to this site. (Anyone else watch The Oscars tonight? If so, please leave the good speeches in the comments; my wife and I yell over the entire show.)

Tuning in, now, to regular programming…

Results That Surprised Me (yeah, I have links for all of these; see below)
Atlanta United FC 3-1 Philadelphia Union (sunny no longer)
Chicago Fire FC 1-2 DC United (I rate DC highly as I.H.O.P. coffee)
FC Dallas 3-3 San Diego FC (weeeeeee!!)
New England Revolution 6-1 FC Cincinnati (Cincy leaping, not stepping, backward?)
Vancouver Whitecaps 6-0 Minnesota United FC (see, goal differential, Minnesota, uncharted)

I call that a good weekend, all in all, at least for anyone who tunes in for spills, chills, thrills and the odd face-plant. Even if the wild start to 2026 doesn’t continue, I doubt you could find even one MLS fan who would have predicted that the bottom three in the East for any week in the MLS 2026 regular season would include (bottom to “top”) Philadelphia, Columbus, and Orlando. The West has at least one surprise – who saw Minnesota looking up at 12 teams at any point this season? – but seeing the teams on either side of Missouri (e.g., SKC and St. Louis) tracks. There is one more team down there in sewers of the West, paddling amid the refuse, one I expected to see and feared to behold at once. Let’s turn to how they arrive at such a lowly station. Our story begins with a man named Philip...

Getting Reacquainted with Los Angeles FC, It Rose from the Corpse of MLS 2.0

The Honey Pot, starring Henry Higgins (1967)

Thumbnail History
As a preliminary, I decided to burden Los Angeles FC with the Chivas USA’s record of failures and accomplishments. The judges (in my head) have allowed this on the grounds that, 1) Chivas USA was created with a potential advantage – e.g., access to the player pool/any rising talent of their parent club, Mexico’s Club Deportivo Guadalajara, S. A. de C. V. – and 2) only three years separate the good and wise demise of Chivas USA and the founding of LAFC. To anyone aggrieved by the choice, bringing in the predecessor’s softer numbers does less damage than you think (only shaved off four Joy Points*), while also imbuing the successor project with the air of a phoenix rising. Anyone paying attention to the chronology of this series may be crying foul on behalf of Atlanta United FC and Minnesota United FC, but I liked the idea of putting Major League Soccer’s two foreign-held subsidiary franchises in back-to-back posts (the New York City FC post went up yesterday).

To quickly touch on Chivas USA, it was conceived as a honey-pot to lure Mexican-American fans to MLS at a time when the league was hard-up for eyeballs. The initial concept boiled down to bringing in, admittedly surplus (i.e., aging), but still famous talent from Mexico’s Chivas, sweetening the pitch by throwing in some potential future stars for the parent club (aka, longshots), and rounding out the roster with whatever non-Mexican players Chivas USA could find between the 2005 Expansion and SuperDrafts. Legendary Mexican midfielder Ramon Ramirez and (I think) Francisco Palencia headlined the effort, but the first-year model went to shit in one short season. It took only one swat from the Wooden Spoon at the end of 2005 for Chivas USA to (largely) abandon all that and become a more or less regular MLS team, effective immediately. The front office gave the team an MLS face-lift for Year 2, calling in midfielder Jesse Marsch as an on-field Svengali, while also bringing in proven experienced pieces for the attack (Ante Razov) and the defense (Carlos Llamosa and Tim Regan). All it took from there was one good (Jonathan Bornstein) and one great pick (Sacha Kljestan) from the 2006 SuperDraft to carry Chivas USA to their first post-season in 2006 and lift them higher still in 2007, when they won the Western Conference. From there, things fell off one season at a time and, slowly, the organization fell apart. By the time all concerned pulled the plug after the 2014 season, I think most MLS fans forgot Chivas USA was around until they showed up on the schedule…

Los Angeles FC Scouting Report, Hatred, Contempt & Gambling

Better at soccer, honestly...

I couldn’t get myself up for another deep dive into Los Angeles FC. Don't blame me. Blame the twits at Major League Soccer HQ, who forgot the adage about familiarity breeding contempt…

…related, LAFC fans have a lively persecution complex about everyone else in the league giving them short shrift and hating on them generally.

Some Basics
And…hey, it turns out I never actually previewed LAFC due to a mini-vacation earlier this month (#worth it), so may as well lay it all out. They currently sit on at 7th in MLS’s Western Conference on a 3-3-3 record, with a tight goal differential (+1), on the right side of average (11.3) for goals scored (15) and the wrong side of average for goals allowed (14). They boast a decent unbeaten record at home (3-0-2), which is all that matters for now because that’s where the Timbers will play them on Saturday (side note, they’re 0-3-1 on the road, which means Portland (or the ref that day, Rubiel Vazquez) gave them their first road point of 2024).

The Lineup
Head coach Steve Cherundolo lines them up in a 4-3-3 (like this one) as if he cannot do otherwise and the personnel remained stable through every game until last weekend’s draw v Red Bull New York when started Mateusz Bogusz over Eduard Atuesta in midfield for reasons I couldn’t sort out without getting into...lore, I guess. The back four typically features (left to right) Ryan Hollingshead, Aaron Long, (Timbers’ fans prime villain from the last match-up) Jesus Murillo, and Sergi Palencia. The usual midfield line-up has Tim Tillman and Atuesta on either side of famous car tire spokesman, Ilie Sanchez, while the front three has most often seen (again, left to right) Cristian Olivera, Bogusz and Denis Bouanga.

Another change in last week’s lineup: once and former New York City FC defender Maxime Chanot started in Murillo’s stead (I see something about a knock in Ye Olde Unreliable Availability Report) and, for what it’s worth, he looked something like incredible, dude can play, etc.

Portland Timbers 2-2 Los Angeles FC: A Meditation on Cherry-Flavored Cough Syrup

This image was called "cuddling a cow," also, yes!

Thus endeth another case study in what might have been. The game turned on a justified red card to Portland Timbers goalkeeper, Maxime Crepeau (it sure looked like Claudio Bravo kept Los Angeles FC’s Denis Bouanga onside; more on him later), and all it took from there was Mateusz Bogusz’s 51st (damn good) minute free-kick to lead to Solomon splitting the baby at one point a piece. Not much happened between there and the final whistle, if with one exception.

The Timbers got lucky to escape with the 2-2 draw because Nathan Ordaz committed no crime ahead of what looked like a last-gasp winner for LAFC. I’m a good partisan and, as such, I don’t blow air into the cow’s nose when it doesn’t shit in my living room, or however that saying goes. To put that another way, Portland may have got lucky on that one call, but they made their luck otherwise and that feels like an improvement over several of the games I’ve seen so far this season. Also, who invited the fucking cow?

If I had to name the most maddening element of the Timbers 2024 season, it follows from the fact that every result comes loaded with too many caveats to make sense of where things stand with them. Today, it was the red card, but it has been playing from a hole measured by one to three goals in earlier outings. This game provided the usual divide of positives and negatives – and I’ll get to some of them (jetlagged AF, honestly) – but my biggest personal positive comes from the Timbers going up, first, 1-0, then 2-1 on two…respectable goals from open play. I’m shading both of those, and for reasons I’ll get into, but, all in all, today’s draw might have been the Timbers most complete game of 2024.

If you’re with me, let’s run over this hill screaming! Aaaauugggghhhhh!!