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.

Portland Timbers 1-1 Seattle Sounders: It Was the [BLANK] of Times

I think cuffs and collars matched. You?

Just to note it, these posts should get shorter the deeper we go into Major League Soccer’s 2025 regular season. Barring new signings in the summer, at some point in any season, the teams have what they have when it comes to the competence of their coach and the quality of their players, strong suits and weak links will be well-known in their equal parts.

Have the Portland Timbers reached that point at…hold on…14 games into the season? Here and there, maybe, but not overall? Nah. Let’s get to it…

About the Game
I didn’t clock how few shots the Timbers fired in Saturday’s 1-1 draw versus the Seattle Sounders until checking the final stats (still catching up, still not wholly connected to the game-day experience). Not what one wants to see in terms of offensive output, obviously, but it didn’t translate into the vague chatter I’d caught here and there about Portland being lucky to escape a loss. The Sounders found their chances – particularly from the low-to-mid 30s when the long ball to Danny Musovski and Roy…er, Ryan Kent was very much on (hold this thought) – but the final score didn’t look like they borrowed it from another game or anything, cuffs and collars matched, etc. Still, seeing just five shots total and knowing at least one of those counted as more hopeful than likely (e.g., Santiago Moreno’s at the 22nd) sets a fan to fretting about the latest drop-off on the attacking side (unless my math’s mistaken, the Timbers have been good for ¾ goal/game since the beginning of May). Per the tone of all the above, Seattle hardly piled on the chances, but I’ve already gotten ahead of myself.

Seeing Kamal Miller in a foot race with, oh, 65% of the league generally spells trouble and seeing Musovski win the decisive one felt inevitable. To his credit, Miller stalled a full breakout and Finn Surman did well to put himself between Albert Rusnak and Maxime Crepeau’s goal…only to tragically leave the five-hole open for Rusnak to shoot through. Seeing a similar play almost come off for a second Seattle goal got a couple dings out of the alarm bell, but Crepeau had a better angle to block Musovski’s shot and got down righteously to cover it. Portland hadn’t been helpless to that point - Juan David Mosquera’s solo/run shot at the 9th minute announced…a presence - but it took most of the half for them to build an attack that misdirected the Sounders defense. Maybe the surprise came from David Da Costa switching to the right, maybe it came from getting the ball behind Seattle’s midfield in one pass; whatever happened, the Sounders defense lost track of Da Costa and Moreno in rapid succession and paid the price with an easy equalizer that, despite credible efforts here and there, they never got around to erasing.

San Jose Earthquakes (Oof) 4-1 Portland Timbers: I Believe the Term Is Jointly and Severally

The number of things that went wrong...

A team can survive a bad night at the office, being a step behind, connected only in sad little spurts, etc. A team cannot, however, survive a half dozen or so catastrophic defensive errors.

I call that kind of collapse a Five-Minute Fall Apart, even when they unfold over an 11-minute span. The rest of the game wasn’t much better and that’s the beginning of the story of how the San Jose Earthquakes rolled the Portland Timbers 4-1 tonight.

About the Game
The post started with a distinction between collective and individual failure for a reason: the Timbers committed sins both individually and as a team tonight, but they might have muddled through, even if just to a more respectable final score, had, say, both Finn Surman and Kamal Miller not bit like half-starved basses on the pieces of bait San Jose dangled before them. Their mistakes turned into the (borderline) sitters that put the game beyond Portland’s likely longest reach inside the first 30 minutes. Maxime Crepeau could have done better on both shots – the man’s head and feet didn’t seem to have an open channel, on the second goal more than the third, for me – and, as much as I get wishing James Pantemis was there, that does everyone the same amount of good as wishing Surman didn’t overcommit all the way into Nevada on the ball into Ousseni Bouda, or that Miller didn’t sprint all the way to the left sideline just to get nutmegged by DeJuan Jones. That’s the individual stuff and I feel confident arguing that three-minute span killed Portland’s chances at three points tonight. Moving on to the stuff that made even one point unlikely…

San Jose scored their first goal on their third (or fourth) run at the same attacking movement – i.e., push the ball outside to a runner sprinting to get around the Timbers’ widest defender on one side or the other, then pull it back to an attacking player who drifted into the space left open by a Portland backline that appears willing to collapse into its own damn goal. Seeing them come close mere minutes before the 90th on the same damn play felt like the right way to wrap up the game, but the problem was always the same. When San Jose pushed the ball wide, an Earthquake player curled off Portland’s defensive line and none of those players tracked that movement; Timbers midfielders – e.g., Joao Ortiz was the closest available option on their first goal – failed to run back to cover that run, leaving some quality attackers with time and the full width of the goal to fire at from around the penalty spot. Under those circumstances, whose man is that? The answer falls somewhere between everyone’s, no one’s and the first player to see him peel off. And that’s the, or maybe just a, collective failure.

Portland Timbers 1-4 Vancouver Whitecaps: The Brutal Laws of the Game & a Game to Aggressively Memory-Hole

So long as it feels better later, I'm good.

The rules of the game, when read and applied in black and white, make some calls unavoidable, even inevitable. I don’t know what Kamal Miller could have done differently in real time – i.e., Brian White’s first touch took the ball into the space into which Miller was running to catch up, he couldn’t do much to avoid some contact, so the real question was always going to turn on the kind of contact that occurred (you can toggle to the video here, but the link doesn't appear to change to the specific highlight) – but, no matter how many details you drop into the basic scenario, there is simply no getting around the fact that Miller was the last defender covering White, an attacking player running into a one-v-one against the ‘keeper, Maxime Crepeau.

I’m confident some Portland Timbers fan will undertake a frame-by-frame deconstruction to argue that White went down too easily and that another other fan will explore the practical physics of how much weight Miller’s hand would have needed to exert upon White’s shoulder in order to cause him to actually fall: by my reading, calling White for a dive presents the only alternative to the red card and I don’t see enough in what happened to sustain a flop.

Miller’s red card wasn’t the only mistake the Timbers made today; it was merely the first. It took several more to get to today’s lopsided 1-4 loss to the Vancouver Whitecaps in Portland. Again. The smoldering question turns on how many of those mistakes followed from Miller’s red card against the balance of them that happened all on their own.

Before getting to that, or to anything else really, I want any Timbers fan who finds this post to keep one thought firmly in mind: as much as this result stings, maybe even embarrasses, it does not matter. It doesn’t matter even a little. Portland still has 33 games left to play and they remain very much alive on the bare terms of competing for an indulgently generous allotment of playoff slots. As MLS fans learn every season, and appear to unlearn after each regular season starts, a team can eat absolute clown-shit for three, even four months and still redeem the season with a good run in the playoffs – see, United FC, Atlanta, just one season ago (even if their own fans don’t entirely feel it). So, throw in the fact that the Timbers couldn’t field its best-possible team, take a deep breath, take the L (/spectator-sports equivalent of an enema), get out those binoculars so that you can take the longest possible view of the overall situation…

…which isn’t the same thing as thinking the Timbers are destined to have a good season, never mind a great one.

Portland Timbers 0-0 FC Dallas, aka, The Sum of Our Greatest Fears in 48 Minutes

Oh, it's coming, champ.

A should-win on Wednesday versus Austin FC that ended in a loss, followed by a must-win late this afternoon versus FC Dallas that ended in a gutless, goal-less, leg-less draw. Ye gods, egads, etc.

First question: how to put a bow on that much nothing?

Second question: when was the last time (verb tense entirely deliberate, btw) you could either believe or talk yourself into thinking that the Portland Timbers have a chance to end their season on the highest-possible high? Don’t know what that was for you, but for me it was a playoff (or play-in) win and a dream of bigger things (no matter how implausible)?

I was somewhat optimistic, personally, even through the loss versus Austin. That optimism took a square shot to the stones tonight and I can name the moment the blow landed: somewhere around two minutes after Felipe Mora’s best shot of the day, aka, the 48th minute or thereabouts. To that point in through both games, Portland had a firm handle on the game-states. They weren't scoring, sure...and, okay, Austin snuck one past them, but the Timbers were still doing good, productive, proactive things all over the field. And then even that dried up. If one accepts the conventional wisdom that Portland can't defend a lead, they need to be the team that outscores all comers. Instead, they've now gone 230 minutes without scoring. Closer to the point at hand, Dallas took over the game after that last best shot and that’s how they tagged ‘em both (both balls, I mean, paraphrasing Kingpin).

The Very Basics, aka, the (Perversely Happy) Flashbacks to the Austin Loss
Much like last Wednesday versus Austin, the Timbers rolled up the chances versus Dallas from around the 17th minute to the 39th. Mora blew at least two chances before steering his best chance wide, Jonathan Rodriguez almost caromed home a header off an Evander free-kick at the 22nd minute, and Evander tried everything up to and including (repeatedly) trying to salsa his way through the middle of Dallas’ defense. Both Juan David Mosquera and Santiago Moreno flailed some shots wide – one of them a hopeful bicycle attempt (Moreno’s) off one of Portland’s best flurries of night – but, for a second week running, the Timbers’ shot selection looked more desperate than wise or good. Finishing and finished product aside, the signs looked all right over the first half: the Timbers won every 50/50, not to mention most of the 40/60s, and they recycled the ball into Dallas’ end of the field over-and-over. Seeing a functioning recycling program felt good, guys…

Portland Timbers 4-2 Los Angeles Galaxy: ADDRIAAANNNN!!!!

Best scene. No notes.

The subtitle for the preview I posted for this game referenced Rocky III. Anyone who has seen that movie fully appreciates its merry absurdity, the boxing sequences, in particular, where large men (and Sylvester Stallone), arms rippling with muscles, landed one head-removing blow after another. None of them had any effect, of course, until they did and every single boxer in the movie stood there, arms at his sides as he had no other choice besides taking it. Blocking a punch is and was for weaklings and commies in the Rocky Extended Cinematic Universe, apparently.

The Portland Timbers' rapturous 4-2 win over the Western Conference-leading Los Angeles Galaxy followed a similar script. Between the construction and particular competencies of both teams, I doubt this game could have ended any other way. As predicted in that preview (c’mon, let me have it; I get so many of these wrong), this game was destined to be a free-swinging brawl. The only open question was which team would land the most swings.

Now, because I’m both on the clock and old…

The Very Basics
That didn’t mean the game didn’t start with some tentative jabs, a period where both sides studied the opposition for openings. The Galaxy fired the first best shot somewhere around the 14th minute, but the Timbers fired the first shot to go in. Evander started getting frisky shortly after LA’s shot – an attitude Portland desperately needed on the night – and mere minutes after firing their first real shot, he played a center-to-touchline-to-center give-and-go with Jonathan Rodriguez, who found a pocket and nodded home a whistle-clean opener.

Portland Timbers 2-1 Sporting Kansas City: It Ain't What You Do, It's the Fact That You Did It

To any Portland Timbers fans feeling underwhelmed by last night’s 2-1 win over Sporting Kansas City, please see the lament from a handful of SKC fans at right.

Real Quick Game Summary
Neither team did much over the first half, even if, in keeping with the final score/numbers, Portland did a little more. There was feeling up, out and everything in between and the Timbers getting the best traction with long balls to Jonathan Rodriguez. SKC had space to play – and that made them look better at times – but Portland erased that at the start of the second half by pushing their line of engagement into SKC’s half. That rattled out a turnover in a good place that Portland exploited through some next-level play by Evander (love the way he swims through that first challenge) and the kind of subtle cross Portland pays him to deliver. Even if the final result lacked for elegance, SKC equalized by paying the Timbers back in the same currency – i.e., they just got on Portland as they tried to play out of the back – but Portland ultimately got their foot on the ball and found the winner through Evander after playing volleyball between the channels (video below). They had to wait a few for Drew Fischer to bless it – as he should have, because Antony wasn’t active in the play – but both the goal and the win stood up, if with a late, great save from Maxime Crepeau to haul it over the line.

Now, before anyone gets carried away about last night’s defensive performance, know it came against a team that, counting last night's loss, hasn't won in eight games and that has lost its last five. Sporting Kansas City is a bad team. I can’t say how much they lost when Erik Thommy went out, but I’m highly confident it didn’t help. The Timbers had to win this game. And, credit to them, they did. The next one’s coming soon and, gods willing, I’ll squeeze in something on that, but I’m going to close this post with (new feature/concept!):

Los Angeles FC 3-2 Portland Timbers: A Long Journey to Nowhere and No Points

Up next, an endless lecture on wormholes...

Well, if that game didn’t barf up talking points like a frat boy sailing three sheets into the wind…

The answer to the question where to begin starts at the end of the first half with the Portland Timbers crawling into an 0-2 hole right ahead of the whistle. The entire half had…more or less sucked, but the Timbers had held on to where the optimistic sort could see them keeping things goal-less and having time to reorganize – particularly on the right side of defense where Juan David Mosquera faced acres of space to manage and a rampant Denis Bouanga to contain. Very much related, Los Angeles FC scored its first goal on the dozenth-plus time Bouanga got loose over there and cut a lethal ball across the area that slid well beyond the tips of Maxime Crepeau’s otherwise excellent fingers. When Portland’s Kamal Miller slid to meet it, he hedged the angle a couple dozen degrees inside and that put LAFC 1-0 up.

There’s nothing to do after that, of course, but to have all concerned dust themselves off, clear their heads and limit any further damage. Yeah, no, that didn’t happen. And I’m going to make a point here that will no doubt get me down-voted to oblivion on Reddit, but I’ll die on this hill: on the one hand, nearly all of LAFC’s most threatening approaches came from Mosquera’s side; on the other, that was always going to happen and what is the rest of the defense/team for if it isn’t to put out the fires he starts?

As anyone who read the scouting report below knows, I was bullish Portland’s chances in this game, if with terms and conditions. One big one: locking down the space where God, all the angels and everyone else knew they’d attack – i.e., through Denis Bouanga and at the right side of the Timbers defense. So, sure, Mosquera made two games’ worth of gaffes last night, but LAFC does not go into the locker room up 2-0 at halftime if just one other field player comes within a country mile of Timothy Tillman trotting up the middle of the field. With no one but an equally-exposed Crepeau to stop him, Tillman slotted home (only available in the full highlights, apparently) and that’s how Portland wound up in that deep hole. 

The final whistle blew on a 2-3 road loss for the Timbers, their (fer crissakes) seventh game(!) with one or fewer points – and, relevant to the overall situation, they’ve picked up zero points out of the balance of those games and just three (fucking) points from the last 21 on offer. And where can that leave a team but riding shotgun with the dregs of the league.

But, wait! There’s more! So much more! Not all of it good, but – hey! – some of it is!

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!!

Portland Timbers 2-2 DC United: Fragility & Composure

The Portland Timbers had all three points in their sweaty palms against DC United tonight only to piss two of them away one raised arm and one catastrophic failure in weak-side defending at a time. One thing led to another and that led to a 2-2 draw-that-felt-like-a-loss final score and...disappointment. Explaining all this gets a little tricky and I want to thank the person who posts as brettcalvin42 on the Timbers subreddit for forcing me to think a little harder about all this.

After a cautious opening minute or three, DC kicked into the fast-zombie press I expected from them. Like any press, it’s designed to force and feast on errors and it started to work its dark magic until Santiago Moreno pulled the classic soccer judo move of letting a ball pass across his body to carry it past a lunging DC defender (probably Pedro Santos). With the wide spaces of the right open to him, Moreno slipped a pass into Dairon Asprilla who finished off the play neatly as you like: 1-0 to the Timbers. And, as good things follow from good deeds, that break seemed to unsettle the one-way certainty of DC’s press. Despite all the buzzing harassment, the Timbers left the field at halftime with a slim but real advantage on the attacking side. They worked transition as well as they ever have and had a real chance to score one more when Moreno found an Eryk Williamson run that twisted DC’s (I think) Christopher McVey damn near out of his shoes.

All that inspired me to chime in with a short note that ended with “I’m happy” on a game thread on the Timbers subreddit. brettcalvin42 took issue with the general statement with a curt note about how giving the ball away was killing the Timbers. Even as I stand by what I…subreddited (is there a reddit equivalent of a tweet?) at halftime, his long-view take became more right than mine as the game went on. What I want to kick around below is why that happened.

Before digging into that, a couple things bear noting. First, for as little as they did in the first half, DC did create two sparklingly clear chances – the first a free header by Cristian Dajome from the outer chack of the six-yard box (which prompted a positively adorable, “I forgive you” hug by Maxime Crepeau to Zac McGraw), the other a shoo-in tap-in for Jared Stroud rediected by a timely toe-poke by Eric Miller. Those slips aside, and with a nod to the halftime stats, I did feel good about where Portland was at halftime. So I sub-redditted about it…

Portland Timbers 2024 Preview: Hopes, Fears & Theories

In a better world...

“It’s Feb. 15 and [the Timbers] still have two open DP spots. It’s almost not even worth talking about them until they fill those spots.”

- Sam Jones, MLS Daily Kickoff

I hold this truth to be self-evident, and to the extent that this post won’t be so much a preview as a series of thoughts, opinions and speculation. Moreover, it starts in a place where I wish I didn’t.

When I saw the Portland Timbers line-up for their final preseason warm-up against Chicago Fire FC, I did not feel the glitz and glamour I’ve come to expect from events in the Coachella Valley. Instead, I saw too much of the same line-up I’ve seen over two back-to-back unsuccessful seasons. Here’s the (probable) line-up for that game (I couldn’t tell because that skeazy miser, Merritt Paulson, lacks the good goddamn sense to treat preseason like the course of appetizers they are):

4-2-3-1: James Pantemis (GK); Juan David Mosquera (RB), Zac McGraw and Kamal Miller (CBs), Eric Miller (LB); at the 2, Diego Chara paired with Eryk Williamson; at the 3, Santiago Moreno, Evander and Dairon Asprilla, and all that with a cherry on top named Felipe Mora.

Between turnover in the roster and players coming back from injury, that isn’t a name-for-name match to the line-up the Timbers trotted out, say, at the beginning of 2023. And yet, when you look at the line-up the Timbers used in MLS Week 1 2023, it amounts to splitting the difference between identical and fraternal twins. In the sense that I rate Mora higher than the departed Jaroslaw Niezgoda and Moreno over the bizarrely hesitant (and also departed) Yimmi Chara, sure, that counts as improvement. But how much?

The fact that Timbers line-up lost their final preseason game to a serially terrible Chicago team injects some vibez gloom into the launch of the 2024 regular season. I don’t know of any franchise in all of sports has put in the work to alienate its fanbase the way Chicago has. Missing the playoffs in 10 of the last 11 seasons is the tip of an iceberg that could sink 100 Titanics. I don’t put any more stock into preseason than the next fan, and I understand that one of Chicago’s goals was a freak-show error that couldn’t be replicated without a live chicken and copious amounts of despair, but, as they say, still…