Colorado Rapids 2-0 Portland Timbers: A Disturbing Glimpse into the Future (and Present)?

Pleasant? God, no. Accurate. Umm....

Bad game, bad result, bad entertainment and, most damning of all, the Portland Timbers played its third “low-energy game” in a row. The only thing saving Portland from a richly-deserved drop to sixth place is the rolling shit-show churning below them. And, so, with a hearty thanks to Real Salt Lake, Minnesota United FC, and, so far, the Los Angeles Galaxy, let’s stare at this turd only for as long as it takes to confirm its shape and composition (don’t worry; won’t use that for the image), and move on.

As the numbers show, that sucked. Aside from losing 2-0 to a half-awake Colorado Rapids team, Portland lost every statistical category besides possession, total passes and passing accuracy - and who gives a shit about those? - and the standard, sharper markers of persistent struggle and failure, clearances, fouls, yellow cards. The Timbers looked good for a draw, at best, up to the point where Colorado scored, but it was a slow bleed to nowhere but another Rapids goal from there…and it’s worth asking, did any Timbers defender have the foggiest fucking idea where any running Rapid was on Colorado’s insurance goal?

There’s nothing to analyze from that loss, honestly, no positives, no promising leads, no what ifs. Reading the cold, hard math, the Timbers will either get the six points of nine that they should get from their final three games (v San Jose, at RSL, v Austin), or they won’t - and let the flood wash over them if they fail.

I don’t have a lot of notes on this one, but, here goes.

The End of an Era…and All That Means
I’ve worried about how Diego Valeri’s career would end earlier than I should have - which is to say, I was wrong and he had a great 2020 - but I’ll be damned if tonight didn’t confirm that the end is nigh, if not already here. One strong shot off a practice-pitch corner aside, I wouldn’t have even known Valeri was on the field tonight. And yet he was, and for 76 minutes.

Portland Timbers 1-0 FC Dallas: One Good Step and a Mess Besides

I fail. I succeed. I live. I die.

How can a game be everything you want, only less? That’s how I feel about the Portland Timbers’ narrow, yet necessary 1-0 home win over piteous FC Dallas. Neither team covered itself in glory tonight - in fact, one could argue that, if Portland strained that hard to beat Dallas, therefore… - but let’s dwell on the happy shit, for there was some. But first, a word on Dallas.

They have had a terrible season, without question, and…. yep, they’re the last team in the Western Conference again, but I see them playing most teams close every time I check box scores and the highlights, they get their chances, and so on. Still, why not sleep on a team that shows no real sign of waking up? As for tonight, and box score be damned, they had the better chances to go ahead early - Ricardo Pepi knocked on Heaven’s Door when he pinged the post on a great cross from Paxton Pomykal in the first half (and Pomykal had a great chance of his own later) - but I also suspect that’s Dallas’ season in a nutshell: a lot of not nearly enough. Call it the wages of life as a selling club (au revoir, Tanner Tessmann), and not getting enough out of players they bank on like Franco Jara (bordering on flop) or Matt Hedges (broken), but Dallas presents as a team all but screaming for an on-field ratio of mentors to mentees of 1:3 at a minimum.

A player like Justin Che provided a good example tonight: he got beat, he lunged, he poked he missed, and so on, but he also played the full 90 without allowing a total collapse. At the same time, against a team with a better idea of what they want to do in the attacking third? That shit’s fatal…

…sadly, Portland is not that team, or wasn’t tonight. There was so much nothing before Diego Valeri came on at the 65th minute, and even then it took some minutes before things - or, rather, Jeremy Ebobisse’s, on review, fairly low-percentage, and yet entirely wonderful goal - to come together. And I’m serious about that: 80% of this was a game of snatching coherence out of its opposite; getting into timelines and brass-tacks makes no damn sense. Somehow the same game contained an endless parade of soccer players making soccer plays (i.e., so many players did so many good things on an individual level to keep possession and/or the ball going where the team wanted it to) while still containing multitudes of futility.

Portland Timbers 2-4 Minnesota United FC: An Unfortunate Spin on the Usual

What if we screamed louder?

I never mentioned it online, at least not until just before kickoff, but I wanted to see the Portland Timbers’ bench tonight. Sure, the FO grasped for some upgrades in the off-season, but the first team hasn’t changed enough (yet) to kill off my curiosity about who else the Portland Timbers have laying around the clubhouse.

When things started well – and they did, all the way up to “Help Me” Dairon Asprilla’s screamin’ opener (I know where the “help me” comes from, but I don’t get it either) – the narrative of a glorious collective future unspooled in my head. The idea was, Portland getting as many players as possible on the field would make this a real team-effort: all hands on deck, every man playing his part, just total, global buy-in from all concerned, and with plenty of minutes all-'round. It looked plausible too, for as long as the Timbers looked plausible. Then the goals started going the other way. Over and over and (one more) over again. The game ended 2-4, and not in Portland's favor.

I credit the Timbers coaching staff for testing the theory (or a theory) to the bitter end. They even doubled-down, as if someone dared them to do it. The last set of players looked like they took a wrong turn out of Lincoln High School’s locker room, but those young ‘uns took a couple shades off Portland’s blushes courtesy of Ken Krolicki scoring Portland’s second screamer of the night. I scream, Dairon screams, Krolicki screams…can we get two more and go to bed happier?

As a game, it wasn’t awful until it became awful. I think a lot of that had to do with Minnesota, unfortunately. They defended without any kind of intent for the game’s first 30 minutes, not really guarding space and certainly not pushing in some direction away from their own goal, but just kind of milling around in that slow-zombie way. Asprilla’s goal capped it all off, but Julio Cascante nodded a powerful header on goal and Pablo Bonilla fired in a solid near-post shot before that; the Timbers looked like they had the game by the scruff for as long as the Loons seemed willing to offer their necks.

New York City FC 0-1 Portland Timbers: The Ballad of Andres Flores

There was this guy named Andres Flores, WHOA-oh-oh!

I mean, I get the thought process behind the way that New York City FC lined up on this game’s decisive set-piece – i.e., set the offside line as far away from your goal as possible, because why wouldn’t you? – but that doesn’t mean I understand how that madness made it from the training ground to a game with points on the line. With all that space between that flat, high line and the goal (again, that was by design), it would take nothing more than a good ball over the top, one player slipping, and that’s an attacking player in clear en route to your goal. By my count, a coaching staff should only have to line that up one time before saying, “Oh, shit. Right. What was I thinking?”

That stupidly soft goal provided the separation, but the Portland Timbers owe their 1-0 road win in the Rumble at the Rhombus (ht: @iamseanspencer) to everything that happened around it. Certain players deserve a little more credit/love for delivering a, frankly, contextually massive win: Sebastian Blanco tops the list, and for reasons both obvious and less than, but the players who deserve the most credit are the people who filled in for the players that even most fans agree Portland can’t do without. If I had to choose between them, I’d give Andres Flores the more vigorous nod, but Renzo Zambrano keeps erasing whatever doubts I have about him one start at a time. Those guys, along with Claude Dielna, got thrown into the deep end, with “show us you can win a tough game” ringing in their ears. The stakes were lower for Dairon Asprilla, and on the grounds that he had less responsibility for proving that Portland can win without Diego Chara on the field. And, unless I misheard, winning without Chara is something that hadn’t happened since July 5,…2015 (wha?).

I’ll be damned if Flores, especially, didn’t do his best Chara impression out there tonight. To carry over a thought from last weekend, just about every player channeled their inner Chara tonight, few more so than Dielna and Larrys Mabiala. Stressful as it was to see both of those players as high and wide as I saw them tonight, the Timbers have found real success pushing against the other team’s attack lately.

At the same time, I think the box score gives a truer read on this game than what you’ll see in the super-condensed highlights. Portland had a pair of great chances – and, holy shit, does Diego Valeri still have it (which he proved on multiple occasions tonight) – but NYCFC had more chances and better ones too. The best ones fell to Valentin Castellanos (here’s one), but Portland by and large succeeded in keeping them away from danger zones. And that’s where the box score goes wrong: the Timbers rarely broke a sweat in this game; whatever the numbers say (ungood things), the Timbers never looked uncomfortable tonight.

Montreal Impact 2-1 Portland Timbers: Dead Ends & Futures

The image feature is fucked up. Here are birds of paradise getting sexy.

What good is a player who is only good every October? I’m asking for Dairon Asprilla, a player the Portland Timbers have carried on its roster since…hold on…wow, 2015. For all his lung-busting effort, he’s scored fewer goals than you think, and over more performances than you realize. God willing, he’s killing it every day with T2, but, without further excavation, I have only his numbers with the Timbers’ first team to go with, and one has to wait a while before having anything to count…something like being in prison and having one day last six months.

And, wow. Wow, wow, wow. Lucas Melano’s numbers are barely better. Even with the year off, yikes.

The Timbers gambled on its youth tonight against the Montreal Impact. The starting eleven included one regular starters (Cristhian Paredes), another guy who’s slipping out of the regular rotation (Jeff Attinella), and one patch-starter (Julio Cascante), maybe two (Marco Farfan). Every other guy Portland fielded has, at most, a start or two with the first team next to his name. They wound up losing 1-2, both to Montreal, and to a freakish, wonderful goal. Honestly, I take off both hats off to Orji Okwonwko’s winner, because that’s, at best, a 1-in-50 kind of goal, a Bird of Paradise, if you will…

…but on the level of argument, it took Montreal pulling that out of their collective asses to win this game. So, yeah, not all is lost, and that’s why I didn’t go with my original, more arresting sub-title, “I Hate this Team And I’ll Never Watch Them Again.” It was a joke, people…

The game started all right – call it 10-15 minutes – before degenerating into a conspiracy between the Timbers giving away the ball and Montreal winning nearly every duel that sent all the traffic toward Portland’s goal. The Timbers started the second half stronger and, when they equalized via the famous trio of Loria-to-Cascante-to Conechny (OK not famous locally, but do any baseball fans get the reference?). Portland looked capable of God-knows-what after that goal, and they played…relatively even with Montreal for the rest of the game, even if, after Okwonwko scored Montreal’s second goal, they never really looked like coming back into it. All the same, and generally allowing for the reality that Montreal’s B+ team narrowly out-played Portland’s B- team (in Montreal), some players looked ready for this level, while others did not.