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| Early season stupor. Also, unfamiliar. |
Tonight, I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by people of
good, clear insight. The Portland Timbers picked up their first road win since
2015 when they beat the Los Angeles Galaxy 1-0, and that’s a big deal. Something else slipped past me, given my anxious
state, but the Timbers also kept a clean sheet today. So, thanks to @cobolsky
and @brioe162, for being wiser men than me.
Still, that “anxious state” followed me home, and it
revealed itself in the way some sort of invisible safety net left the game when
David Guzman walked off, holding his left arm all funny. Guzman jacked his
shoulder, as we all know now, even as we don’t know how badly, on what wound up
being a second-yellow challenge from the Los Angeles Galaxy’s Jelle Van Damme.
I watched that specific replay often as they showed it, and I’m still not
100%-clear as to whether Van Damme hit Guzman at knee level, or whether Guzman hurt
himself on a leap/dive to get around Van Damme’s lunge. It doesn’t matter in
the grand scheme, I mean, Guzman will take the same amount of time to heal,
whether fair or foul, and that’s my biggest take-away from this game.
Things went some form of haywire after Guzman stepped off.
Portland’s central defensive arrangement has functioned like a triangle through
preseason and Game 1 2017 – e.g. Liam Ridgewell and Lawrence Olum, and with
Guzman running in front of them in defense, and dropping between them when
Portland had possession. Basically, Guzman really has (near as I can tell, and
I can’t promise proximity) played as pure a No. 6 role as Portland will allow,
and, once he went off, Portland reverted to Olum and Roy Miller (Ridgewell’s
sufficiently creditable replacement) behind Ben Zemanski and Diego Chara, who
receded to the back line in order to protect the lead, and the win. The sweet,
sweet road win. Smells like honeysuckle on a June night, I tell you…
That was nice, right, sweet reverlry? Now, back to the panic…
