San Jose Earthquakes Scouting Report: You Know What? Fuck It.

Yummy and a future worth dreaming about.

As I sit down to type this, I can’t help but wonder if there’s a point to it. The Timbers won’t play again until the middle of July (July!) and San Jose doesn’t play another regular season game until the week after. I mean, how many teams will come back after the break remade, refreshed and quite possibly smelling of peaches and mint. You say that’s silly, I say you never know. But, because I did the work…

The Basics

San Jose Earthquakes
9-3-2, 28 pts., 14 GP; 31 gf, 14 ga (+17); home 4-2-1, away 5-1-1
Last 10 Results: WWWWWWDDLL (6-2-2)
Strength/Location of Schedule
@ VAN (1-0 W); v SD (3-0 W); @ SKC (3-1 W); @ LAFC (4-1 W); v ATX (5-1 W); @ STL (3-2 W); @ TFC (1-1 D); v VAN (1-1 D); @ SEA (2-3 L); v FCD (2-3 L);

I made the personally unsettling decision to track only the past ten games for every team in Major League Soccer (literally killing me), but for anyone who forgot the San Jose Earthquakes conceded one single goal over their first six games (versus Seattle Sounders; hold that thought). Even after the surrendered their second goal, then third, then fourth, then they allowed two after that, etc., it took to the beginning of (fucking) May for San Jose to draw its next game of 2026. In the words of the great philosopher, Gwen Stefani, that shit is bananas for the team that traded Cristian Espinoza to Nashville SC and doesn’t have any other player that would make most people’s short list for league-elite players.

When they picked up their second loss of the season at Seattle, nobody blinked because why would you? They were 10-1-0 at the time, San Jose was bound to slip up at some point, so why not again a Sounders that both started strong and beat them previously? Even that was tricky – e.g., they started a sacrificial lineup and gave up two shit goals, but the first shit goal (midfield where?) – which tied the score – came after Ousseni Bouda and Preston Judd came into the game. Judd returned the game to 2-2 with his ninth(!) goal of 2026, but Seattle scored the winner (also not good; defenders where?) after Beau Leroux and the experienced Paul Marie came in to solidify the defense. And then came last weekend versus FC Dallas...

Portland Timbers 1-1 San Jose Earthquakes: A Tale of Wild Cards & Cliches

Killing himself. Wild, right?

For those who missed it, Preston Judd had a big game in the San Jose Earthquakes’ 3-3 draw versus Houston Dynamo FC. Two weeks after that opportunist’s brace, he teed up the winner in San Jose’s win at the till-then utterly hapless Los Angeles Galaxy.

Judd scored the late equalizer in San Jose’s 1-1 draw at the Portland Timbers, of course, but guess who fired the shot that led to the rebound he put back? Ousseni Bouda. Now guess who Judd set up for the winner against the Galaxy? Yep, Bouda.

When prepping to face the ‘Quakes, any sane coach would key on The Cristians (Espinoza and Arango) and Josef Martinez. Martinez didn’t suit up yesterday, something I think was known, but who knows? The larger point is, who builds a game-plan around stopping Ousseni Bouda and Preston-fucking-Judd?

Still, what is a wild card except an old-school cheat code? And yet…is that what really happened?

About the Game
I only half-watch games when I see them live (to anyone wondering why I don’t go to many of them), so I just sat down to re-watch the second half. Even that confirmed a handful of loose perceptions I had from the first half – e.g., the Timbers performed soccer well enough, but the ‘Quakes always looked that little bit more incisive, Dave Romney won every 1-v-1 against Santiago Moreno and basically took him out of the game, etc. Still, and despite what was scored as Portland’s 0.55 xG versus San Jose’s 1.09 at the half, the Timbers played well enough to make me think they would hold it together and had a punter’s chance of figuring it out before the final whistle. Full disclosure, I missed Ian Harkes’ second yellow card – of which, funny! (i.e., his foul on Diego Chara was soft, without being wholly, laughably unreasonable) – plus a couple early shots (which, if The Mothership means to earn its keep, should be in the full highlights). As for the +/- 15 minutes after Harkes’ 52nd -minute sending off? Yeah, caught all of that. Soccer has at least a half dozen cliches and, as just demonstrated by San Jose, a team playing like 12 men after going down to 10 is very much one of them.

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.