Getting Reacquainted with FC Dallas, MLS's Consummate B (or B-) Students

How's your Italian, young man?

[Standing Disclaimer: While I have watched…just a stupid amount of MLS over the years, I don’t watch the vast majority of games, never mind all of them. As such, it’s fair to take anything below that isn’t a hard number or a physical trophy as an impression, a couple steps removed.]

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FC Dallas, fka, the Dallas Burn undermine the entire “Joy Point” concept (see end of post for methodology*) because they rank seventh in MLS history more for consistency than what any fan would recognize as joy. Choosing their best season required no more thought than choosing between the two seasons they actually won a trophy. Dallas rose to these lofty heights the same way Red Bull New York did – i.e., by being in the league for as long as they have and consistently making the playoffs. Unlike the Red Bulls, I don’t believe anyone outside their most committed fans (meant, here, as both committed and “committed”) have ever uttered the words, “I think this is Dallas’ year. They did reach MLS Cup once, in 2010, but they lost to…the Colorado Rapids. (When people tell you that MLS is a weird league, believe them.) And yet, and to their very real credit, Dallas have missed the playoffs just seven times in 28 seasons (including one season they got tagged by the Wooden Spoon (2003)) and they finished in the top half of the table in (literally) half the time. Not a bad run, all in all, but not a great one, and not what any reasonable person would describe as “joy.” If one had to grade the Dallas franchise what could you give them but a B, or maybe even a B-. On the plus side, they do have that dynamite academy, aka, America’s answer to Ajax in the Eredivisie…makes you wonder how high they could rise if they kept some of those promising players two days after their 20th birthday. Or thereabouts.

Best Season(s)

The 2016 season, easily, and with nod to the prior season as a sign of things to come. I had to check back to both rosters to remember who suited up for them in both years (2015 and 2016) and, small coincidence, those same players are well-represented (if not over-represented and via a cheat) in the 10 Players to know section below. Those sections speak to another general truth about FC Dallas: it’s less that they never make ambitious signings than that they often miss the mark when they do, sometimes wildly. At any rate, Dallas won both the Supporters’ Shield and the U.S. Open Cup in 2016, which means their fans felt actual joy once – which I suppose beats the usual experience of salivating over the latest academy kid that they’ll say goodbye to right around the time they remember his name...

Portland Timbers 1-1 FC Dallas: The Limitations and Blessings of "Eh, Good Enough"

Explain that entire civilization and make it POP.

Had FC Dallas’ Paul Arriola not flubbed on one-and-a-half breakaways, had Jesus Ferreira not been called offside on Dallas’ best team attack, had Aljaz Ivacic failed to see the same player’s shot curl around Larrys Mabiala at the tail-end of their best chunk of the game, and had the Timbers not worked the ball smartly from right to left – and for once – to set up their best chance from open play, I could have started watching that game around the 85th minute and walked away without feeling I'd wasted 85 minutes of my life.

MLS Week 24 featured all kinds of good, compelling games, many of them with scores ending in results positively begging for a longer look. This was not one of them.

On a weekend when chaos reigned, the Portland Timbers served up another plate of the same-ol’-shit, a ho-hum motherfucker of a 1-1 draw at home against a team that, say it with me, “is above them in the standings, but not playing their best at the moment.” I’m at the point where the words “unbeaten run” have become a triggering event. If you want to find something to feel good about in this one, you’ll have to sift through a ton of dirt. And archaeology feels like a good metaphor for this one: sometimes you have to look at a potsherd and expand on it to explain a whole goddamn forgotten civilization. Or maybe you just chuck the potsherd and figure it was worth forgetting.

Tthat’s my cue to admit to missing just about everything besides Dallas’ still-later equalizer. As noted in the game thread, I thought Matt Hedges nodded home the equalizer; in reality, it came off Diego Chara’s head, and I can’t think of a louder way to whisper, “maybe you’re cursed” than that. Unlike many a Timber, Chara had a decent night, i.e., leading a defensive line that had, comedic fuck-ups notwithstanding (see Arriola’s two spurned chances), managed Dallas’ feeble attack well enough. I touched on Dallas’ salad days above – the first 20 minutes of the second half, give or take – but, again, it took Portland’s worst moments to give them their good ones.

Going the other way, at least they had them. If you take the chance flagged in the mess of a run-on sentence that started this post and maybe the chance that teed up Portland’s late, yet not late enough penalty kick, the Timbers didn’t do collectively much all night, 16 shots and five shots on goal be damned. The few things that happened for either team came in individual moments – again, see the above run-on sentence. With only a few exceptions – e.g., Santiago “Wee Wrecking Ball” Moreno on the attacking side, Dario “Hack the Bone” Zuparic on the defensive side, a couple bail-outs from Ivacic and Marvin Loria finding the rare openings – everyone in green and flat yellow fell somewhere between good enough (e.g., Bill Tuiloma, David Ayala), undistinguished (e.g., Yimmi Chara) and invisible (e.g., Jaroslaw Niezgoda, but also look at that passing map).

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.

USA 1-0 Costa Rica: Regular as Tuesday

Third image for "regular Tuesday." I like it.

Start with a premise: the U.S. Men’s National Team started (some of their) most promising young players, but not their (alleged) best, and go from there. Those kids lined up against a Costa Rican national team that was certainly experienced, but, full disclosure, I have no idea as to whether or not that’s Costa Rica’s finest.

Next question: how’d it go?

Eh. 1-0 to the U.S., and about as exciting as that sounds.

I’d say the U.S. was the clearly better team, or at least the one that played like it believed it could win – something else from playing to win – but Costa Rica had a great chance at the game’s first goal and they had at least two buck-naked breakouts (which means the U.S. had only one or two defenders close enough to matter) before that miss. Those breaks aside, the Americans started strong, and their movement and passing had the Costa Ricans chasing; Costa Rica adjusted by condensing its defensive lines, and the game turned into your everyday, ordinary CONCACAF slog.

To sum up, a young, untested American team played an experienced team from its qualifying region, one that has consistently ranked number 3 in the region behind the U.S. and Mexico, and they looked the better team, but still barely beat them. That's as regular as Tuesday, when you think about it.

Welcome to my blank slate for the U.S. Men’s National Team. I’ve made the decision to say, fuck the past, let’s just look at what’s in front of us. At this point, the U.S. is good enough to barely beat Costa Rica – and at home.

Portland Timbers 0-1 Portland Timbers (Fine, DC United)

These don't have a snooze button. There is no snooze button.

Well, are we all prepared to pretend Thanksgiving dinner came off all right this week?

[Ed. - Fwiw, the walkout by the Emerald City Supporters was the right response in my book; funny things could happen when MLS decides to make the ambience more appealing to right-wing supporters. I’d love to stop talking about this shit too, but here’s the thing: it never came up until the league started enforcing the ban.]

A fairly experimental Portland Timbers line-up came up against a fiercely organized DC United defensive set-up – especially in the second half – and the Timbers mostly peppered it with blows both glancing and wayward (looking at you, Jorge Moreira). Forced to choose between shooting into a thicket and trying to get around it, the Timbers tried the latter to fairly useless effect. On the plus side, Portland scored all the goals today – even the one the entire goddamn refereeing apparatus failed to spot (keep bringing the quality product, MLS) – they just scored them for DC, and so the game ended 0-1 against the Timbers, who no longer look like the 2nd-in-the-West “lock” more than a few of us dreamed of earlier this season…y’know, before some great thinkers decided to complicate the enthusiasm.

DC deserves credit for playing in the first half, because they didn’t do that so much of it in the second half. They didn’t have to either – see Paul Arriola’s near-miss on Andres Flores’ gift – because they looked ready and capable of keeping Portland out of the goal for another 250 minutes.

Portland held the upper hand throughout, but Bill Tuiloma’s own-goal at the 25th minute rightly tripped the “oh, shit alarm.” With the way they defend (well), a DC lead always had the potential to steal a result, and DC had found ways to unsettle Portland’s defense before the goal – e.g., Paul Arriola carving a seam up the gut. The goal followed from Ulises Segura getting around some scrambling defenders and hitting the cross that Tuiloma chipped in. The halftime whistle felt like hitting the snooze button, but the sense the Timbers would ever wake up slipped away bit by bit, starting with whistle to start the second half sounded. First came an awkward back-pass, then came Eryk Williamson’s yellow card; these were not the thoughts and motions of a locked-in team. The field generally tilted in Portland’s favor from there, but, hard as I hoped for it, I stopped expecting them to win around the 70th minute, and figured they’d fall short of a draw when Tomas Conechny’s fresh Argentine energy fizzled against the same low-block force-field that Portland could only cross into and over with toddler-like power and precision. That was around the 80th minute, but probably a little after.

United States 2-0 Costa Rica: Ruler Theory

All shapes, sizes and qualities. All too big for some.

The United States Men’s National came out the other end of a scrapping slog against Costa Rica with a 2-0 win earlier today. It certainly wasn’t handed to the U.S. – Costa Rica kicked ‘em a couple times to remind the U.S. they were there to play (nothing malicious, just present) – and they struggled for long stretches of the game to play through a well-organized and well-coordinated defense. The break-through goals came late, though, and that’s the story of this edgy friendly.

One thing, though: I will never get used to Gregg “Both Gs” Berhalter’s fixation on dicking around with the ball in the back. I think I’m starting to get the risk/reward calculus involved – more below – but you saw the ball get tangled in Zac Steffen’s leg that one time in the second half, and I could feel the breath of that Costa Rican attacker on the back of my neck. Anyway…

The win felt good, especially in the sense that it underlined last weekend’s result against Panama, and in more ways than one, but I won’t project much out of it. From what I understand (I was only half-listening, honestly), the U.S. will have all eligible, healthy players available for the two friendlies coming up at the end of March – against Ecuador and against Chile – and those games will hand us all a big enough ruler to accurately measure the machine “Both Gs” Berhalter is building, and the ground underfoot will feel a little firmer after that. All the same, I plan on withholding judgment on the design and elegance of the car we’re driving till after this summer’s CONCACAF Gold Cup.

Back to the Panama thing, the Americans started just as slowly in this game as they did against Panama, only with the twist of facing Costa Rica, a better team. The Central Americans’ counter was very much on at that point, and they caught the U.S. midfield too far forward a couple times. Their pressure was effective, but also efficient: they built it around positioning, as opposed to scrambling, and they had a player in the pocket of any American when the ball arrived at his feet, plus another player or two nearby foreclosing on available outlets. Yanqui players struggled with this, none more than the Chicago’s Fire’s youngster, Djordje Mihailovic. After impressing around the edges last week against Panama (with his movement, for me), Mihailovic reacted slowly here, and like his head was in different places there, but he coughed up the ball over and over again, and mostly via theft.