Club du Foot Montreal 1-2 FC Cincinnati: (Long-Suffering) Heroes & Off-Switches

It doesn't matter that the bar is low; it's that you clear it.

“…but what I want to see from #FCCincy this weekend is win-or-die-trying commitment. Low bar.”

That was the last sentence of the preview thread I posted Friday afternoon for FC Cincinnati’s stunning, victorious 2-1 visit to Montreal-sur-la Gulf. I have two thoughts:

1) FC Cincy responded, with one player in particular clearing the bar; and
2) the bar wasn’t all that low in the end.

Those thoughts expand on and compliment one another: Club du Foot Montreal had Cincinnati at one form of their mercy or another for, oh, the middle 50 minutes of this game - i.e., from the 20th minute to about the 70th. It was never outright dominance - Cincy’s 5-3-2 saw to that - but the Orange & Blue played a big part of this game on the wrong side of a submission hold. Key players for Montreal got on the sharp end of their attack moves - Romell Quioto, Victor Wanyama and Djordje Mihailovic stood out; having Quioto basically post-up at the top of the area over the last 20 minutes of the first half caused all kinds of trouble - building pressure to, yes, a breaking point.

After 40 minutes of giving away very little, Cincinnati lost track of who had who on their left and Montreal got one of their bread-and-butter breakaways behind a fullback (Ronald Matarrita in this case). (I think) Zachary Brault-Guillard raced down Montreal’s right with no defenders within 10 yards of him while Quioto ran just as buck-ass nude right up the middle. Brault-Guillard squared and…we all know how that ended, a catastrophic breakdown that miraculously didn’t end in catastrophe. Given the imbalance in play to that point, it didn’t look like an omen…

Montreal did score eventually and, again, the cascade of mistakes that allowed that goal should sober up any Cincy fans getting a contact high from this win - so sit through them all, like its penance. The broadcast booth talked about Rudy Camacho’s “great pass” to Mihailovic, but he only had to walk into the space Luciano Acosta opened in the 5-3-2 when he stepped forward to become the third Cincinnati player staring at Camacho. Mihailovic a wide-open lane toward goal from beginning to end, first, because no one was near him, and then again when Geoff Cameron let him free to run onto the square pass. Cincinnati made at least one more mistake that should have been fatal - I think it was Allan Cruz who straight-up passed the ball to Quioto inside Cincinnati’s penalty area - but Cameron cleaned up that fuck up, while Gustavo Vallecilla combined with ‘keeper Kenneth Vermeer to snuff out yet another occasion when Quioto got loose in the area. The point is, even in a conservative formation, Cincinnati could easily have given up three goals. Something about there but for the grace of CF Montreal…

Portland Timbers 2-1 Houston Dynamo: A Win, a Loss, an Uneasy Sensation

Drafty...

“Timbers fans will never forget the complex emotional rush as he took the Providence Park field as a Timber one last time.”

That’s from The Mothership’s recap and, personally, nothing about the emotional rush was “complex.” I watched the Portland Timbers’ stressful (please, God, not another draw) 2-1 win over the Houston Dynamo with only a couple people, and we toasted Adi at least three times last night. Timbers fans had the fun of watching Adi grow into its first genuinely reliable forward of the Major League Soccer era, and that means Adi will leave a little history behind when he goes. Did I tear up when he scored the game winner? No, shut up…that was…hold on, look over there! (I’ll loop back to this.)

The recap also featured this statement:

“Blanco was in contention for [Man of the Match], given his opening goal and the work he did in breaking down Houston's defense all match. But then Adi stepped on the field, seized the narrative, and made his last one count.”

Nah, it was Blanco, not least because that (frenetic) game-winner doesn’t happen if he doesn’t rescue the ball from (pretty sure it was) Alfredo Machado’s sliding tackle. After a whole damn night of seeing Portland shove the ball forward with the blunt cluelessness of a toddler straining to shove the square-shaped object into the star-shaped hole, that moment of composure really stood out. I’ll skip the over-long back-story for what pops into my head every time I see a team force the ball forward like that* [ed. see note, at the bottom], but, even when you play into the teeth of a team’s defense, you still want to hit around the actual goddamn teeth. The Timbers kicked at one tooth after another more most of last night, and it very nearly cost them two points. And a serious dent to team/fan morale. So, God bless you, Mr. Blanco, and you too, Mr. Adi.

It takes a goal with that much narrative and poetry to it stuff (hold on, 80-12, yeah) 68 minutes of teeth-grating frustration into the place where I keep my repressed memories (e.g., that short hitch in the KGB). Between Houston’s (too-soon!) equalizer and the game-winner, an almost tangible gloom hung over the table where I sat, watching and stewing as Dynamo players seemed to read every pass Portland played into midfield. I’m looking at the box score now and I’m calling it what it is - a damned filthy propaganda. Unless the league has re-defined the word “pass’ to include cases where the player controls it for less than one second, the Timbers never completed 83% of its passes last night, and I think they got the numbers backwards on the duels too. (Maybe they used a random number generator? A rooster pecking corn?)

Houston Dynamo 2-2 Portland Timbers: An Unwelcome Comparison

Also, these get fucked up real fast.

A couple, three weeks back, I posted a poll on twitter that gave a quartet of projected overall records (e.g., 6-5-3, 4-7-3, 8-2-4, etc.) with which the Portland Timbers would see out the 2017 season. I don’t remember the exact numbers (and that tweet lies buried beneath an avalanche of anti-Trumpublican venting), but I landed on each of those projections by going through the rest of Portland’s schedule and divining results based on the opposition, the venue for each game, and some vague potential plotlines for each opposing team going forward. I felt like science, people (if only social science).

How’d I do so far? I had the home game against Real Salt Lake carved in stone as an easy Portland win (violently nope!), and yesterday’s draw against the Houston Dynamo as a certain loss – both of those across all scenarios. As for the road win against the Vancouver Whitecaps, I put that down as either a loss or a draw, so…yeah, fucking psychic over here. If anyone out there wants help picking the ponies, I offer reasonable hourly rates. (A friend helpfully pointed out that I got the total number of points over the past three games right at least – four points out of nine.)

If I sound less confident than I used to over the past couple seasons about what’s happening with the Timbers, I guess my rebuttal is, can you blame me? If this team played soccer like it thwarts expectations, they’d win the triple every year.

As for yesterday, the best excuse I can offer for a bogus (and silent) “Lock of the Week” prediction was that the Dynamo team I expected didn’t show up. Part of that had to do with the twin Honduran terrors – Alberth Elis and Romell Quioto – starting the game on the bench. Portland countered with a line-up close enough to its starting eleven – and that’s even with Lawrence Olum starting in central defense (more later), and Darlington Nagbe and Sebastian Blanco starting on, at least what I assumed were the opposite of their usual assignments in the 4-2-3-1.

The Timbers opened the game strong (literally; just re-watched the condensed game and the team held possession through Nagbe’s opening shot inside the first minute), and they continued to find one another in space all the way to Diego Valeri’s opening goal. Some bad defending provided either the secondary or primary assist (Zarek Valentin fed Valeri, but, holy shit, did Leonardo make at least one terrible decision in playing that pass), but the Timbers earned that one. The team looked comfortable most of the evening, especially on the ball; the passing was respectably crisp and all concerned looked lively in spite of Houston’s sticky East Texas heat.

Portland Timbers 4-2 Houston Dynamo: Referees and Comeback's a Bitch

Referees pictured at right, toward the top...

I can’t speak for the rest of Providence Park, but, the second the halftime whistle blew, my little corner of it positively raged at the referee (Alex Chapman, right?). So many middle fingers; didn’t think there were enough hands to hold all of ‘em. And  yet, a couple notes on this.

First, referees are as the gods; we are but their playthings. To put that another way, try to think of them the same way the ancient Greek thought of their gods – i.e., as capricious beings meddling in the affairs of mortals – and you’ll keep your blood pressure in check, your face won’t develop lines later in life because you’ll twist it into contortions less often, etc. I guess this makes the crowd a Greek chorus of the crowd, and the players the armies at the foot of Troy’s walls…c’mon, we’ve all read The Iliad, yes?

As for the job of refereeing itself, I view keeping a lid on potential violence during a game as their primary mission. After that, I assume they all try get things right, but I also understand that they’ll bone a few calls most games, and it is what it is. All in all, it’s a shitty, thankless job that both fans and players make worse. A world without referees is a world without soccer, so can we all move on from this particular whining point?

OK, next point…hold on…gotta climb down from my high horse…

Second, in most cases a referee can only hurt a team when they’ve left themselves in a position to be hurt. And that’s at least a bit of what happened last night in the Portland Timbers' (eventual) 4-2 win over the Houston Dynamo: the Timbers coughed up free kicks all around their 18, and most of the fouls were legit – including the one that lead to Houston’s penalty kick. Roy Miller got his leg around Erick “Cubo” Torres, a call was reasonably made, etc.