FC Dallas L'il Scouter: Going Prepared (to Avoid the Jump Scare)

4-2-0 road record, AAUGGHGHH!!

Respecting the fact I can only know so much about a team at glance, kindly accept this offering in the same spirit. That said, when you don’t know much, what else can you do but start with…

The Facts
Record & Related Stats
7-4-4, 25 pts., 15 GP; 30 gf, 22 ga (+8); home 3-2-4, away 4-2-0
Last 10 Results: WDDLLWWLWW (5-3-2)
Strength/Location of Schedule
@ DC (4-0 W); v STL (1-1 D); v LAG (2-2 D); v MIN (0-1 L); @ SEA (1-2 L); @ RBNY (2-0 W); v RSL (3-1 W); v VAN (2-3 L); @ SJ (3-2 W); @ COL (2-1 W)

A couple things jump out there (and apologies for any typos; I do those). I’d start with that 4-2-0 road record – especially with three of the four coming hot into the World Cup break – but I’m mostly struck by seeing a Dallas team improving as the regular season turns into summer. My memory could be faulty on here, but the Dallas teams I recall from the past 10 or so seasons past start hot enough to get people thinking they could have a strong one, only to have them slouch slowly to the playoff line and yo-yo on either side of it before making a wholly forgettable playoff run.

At the risk of repeating a prediction that seems to blow up in my face every other season…Dallas looks good this year.

The Lineup(s)
The (Moribund) Mothership tells me Eric Quill (good vibes) generally sends out his starting XI in a 3-4-3 (mostly like this one), but the broadcast had them in a 4-4-2 for the loss versus Vancouver that looked plausible based on the lineup (available here; first couple seconds are all you need, but Sebastian Berhalter scored a couple bangers in that one).

Club America 1-1 Portland Timbers, Then a "Loss": Penalties & Positivity

Make that pass again, Felipe. I'm waiting...

Take it. Take your meaningless, non-regulation, asterisk-weighted win, Club America. It means nothing, not even to you.

Oh, and stopping the game to put a lid on “discriminatory chants”? Sign me up for an all-day pass on that shit…and if I could come up with a functional way to punish a team for one of their shithead fans pointing a laser into a goalkeeper’s eyes during a penalty shootout, I’d do it tomorrow. Too easy to game, sadly. At any rate…

Club America 1-1 Portland Timbers; 5-(maybe)4 in penalties
About the Game
I can’t remember the last time I saw the Timbers counter-punch so cleanly. David Da Costa clipped a ripe peach of an assist off the outside of his right to send Ariel Lassiter clean through for Portland’s opening goal, but Felipe Mora’s chest-trap, reverse through-ball to Juan David Mosquera set my nether to fluttering and they still haven’t calmed down (might be in here). Sure, Mosquera pissed it away with a touch long enough for the record books, but the sweet, sweet memory still titillates.

America took over the rest of the first half and, factually, had more to show for it than I recalled (e.g., 7 shots, 2 on goal, with healthy side of corner kicks), but the Timbers defended stoutly and well (hold that thought) – up to and including Jimer Fory retreating behind an extended Maxime Crepeau to clip a(n offside) shot clear (also, remember him foundly, for…)

I didn’t see Fory’s first yellow card – heard it was something about dissent, and there’s this whole chicken-egg thesis waiting to be written about refs and their thin skin – but no decent ref gives a second yellow for the foul he committed, and yet…the Aristocrats! When the theretofore largely hapless America scored an equalizer off their 19th nervous corner (reference/gotta step there, Mr. Felipe Mora), all signs pointed to the wheels spinning off into outer orbit for the Timbers. Without dipping too far to over-determining, I credit Phil Neville for making a couple smart subs for breaking from depth – Kevin Kelsy for a reasonably overwhelmed Mora and Antony for a drifting Da Costa – and it just took a combination of holding on defensively and scaring America off throwing every player, plus a couple asshole fans, to carry the Timbers to one-third of a loss, instead of a full one.

10 Thoughts I Had While Watching Portland Draw Minnesota

Minnesota, in human form, at home.

I decided to try something new for match reports and for a couple reasons, but I’ll only bore you with the substantive one: going deep on any given game isn’t so different from running an experiment once with a small and hyper-specific dataset. When you get right down to it, it takes string of results to make a dataset that’s worth a damn – and even those have ups and downs to go around. As my Portland Timbers have demonstrated over the past five (1-3-1) to ten (3-4-3) match days…

Portland Timbers 1-1 Minnesota United FC
About the Game, Still More Briefly
Nothing of note happened in the first half, thus endeth that portion of the post.

Overall, though, pretty goddamn dull, in part due to Minnesota’s soul-sucking approach to the game and in part due to the Timbers looking…familiar in all the wrong ways. Against that, I’m glad I re-watched the second half (I was entertaining through the first viewing, or was I merely hosting, because was I all that entertaining?) because, even as the result felt insufficient (in the biggest picture), Portland put on a better show than I remembered.

Both teams posted better final numbers than I would have guessed after sitting through it (1.5 times). Still, Minnesota put the Timbers in the uncomfortable position of using the ball and the discomfort showed. Nodding back to expectations, the Loons scored on a set piece – a reported specialty for them, despite all the headers over the crossbar (for both teams, really) – with Anthony Markanich adding to his unexpected haul for 2025. Between there and the final whistle, Minnesota either slipped up by allowing Juan David Mosquera time and space in the right channel – either that, or they got cocky and thought they could manage it – and they got within mere minutes of getting away with it. Mosquera snapped back with, 1) one of his best attacking performances of the season, 2) a shot off the crossbar that put-near broke it (certainly somewhere in here), and 3) an assist on Omir Fernandez’s tidy equalizer. Couldn’t feel happier Fernandez, that scrappy little scamp.

Out of context, I’d call this result respectable. Minnesota’s a brick shithouse of a team, they’re a ways higher in the Western Conference standings, if not as high as they would have been if they’d held on, and seeing Portland push to the end felt good. The fact the Timbers pulled it off with a gently rotated starting XI made it feel a little better. Add context back into the mix – i.e., the run of results over the past five, ten games, the reasonable argument that good, competitive teams beat good, competitive teams at home – and things feel a little worse.

St. Louis CITY FC 2-1 Portland Timbers: Paging General Buck Turgidson

Didn't get the joke in this character's name till I saw it spelled.

So, St. Louis CITY FC was about two times better, by some raw numbers? I figured they had a firm grip on the edge, but there go the judges handing them the decision...

St. Louis CITY FC 2-1 Portland Timbers
About the Game
The Timbers scored the first goal for the second match day in a row and by a cleaner strike from the same player – David Da Costa - within a mere foot or three of where he scored last week’s winner. Santiago Moreno played the (surprisingly easy) ball that slipped Da Costa behind St. Louis’ midfield, thereby challenging the defenders to do anything but back up. They backed off, allowing Da Costa to squeeze his shot through a tangle of legs not much bigger than a mousehole – and good for him!

Portland’s goal came more than a little against the run of play, even with St. Louis failing to mine many chances out of their possession and general upper-handedness. That also typified what passed for the game-state of the first half – i.e., the Timbers met St. Louis’ overall attacking prowess at a 1:3 of raw, undistinguished shots, while making something dangerous out of their best moments (e.g., that slick overlap between Da Costa and Jimer Fory that squeezed some sweat out of Roman Burki; per the full highlights, Da Costa woulda done better to pull back to Kelsy instead of shooting). Portland carried a 1-0 advantage into the halftime locker room…but the numbers were against them even then and that was the last happy memory I have.

Credit for the decisive moment goes to St. Louis’ Tomas Ostrak, who climbed his way up the spine of midfield, one vertebrae at a time, shaking off Timbers defenders on two of them, before forcing the ball forward to where Marcel Hartel (still a funny name) roofed it into Maxime Crepeau’s goal. That moment pinned the tail into the competitive heart of the game: whether Portland could keep finding their slashing paths to chances on St. Louis’ goal versus the weight of St. Louis’ attacking and counter-pressing pressure.

Portland Timbers 2-1 New England Revolution, The Late (Late), but Still Pretty Good Show

Treat yourself!

Just rewatched the full highlights and think I heard something about both the Portland Timbers and the New England Revolution rolling into Saturday on unbeaten streaks. Sound salesmanship, but also inaccurate.

Still, the most affirming talking point about the Timbers in 2025 is the fact that, unfortunate trips to the North side of the Great Lakes region notwithstanding (one for your therapist or for your priest, depending on one’s outward reaction), Portland has improved on winning more of the games they should win. Hosting a Revolution team running (currently) four points under the Eastern Conference play-in line definitely makes the list and – drink ‘em if you got ‘em – Portland won this one. As for how they looked doing it.

Portland Timbers 2-1 New England Revolution
About the Game, Briefly
Given the past three or four weeks, just seeing Portland start as the better team counts as a l’il victory (so treat yourself!). They crowned that period of…let’s go with subtle dominance with a go-ahead goal that, all things considered, took a couple happy accidents to come together. That’s not to dismiss (or diss) the goal – the Timbers put together a might chain of “yes, and” to create the opening – but I doubt Santiago Moreno consciously weighted his cross to fall to Ian Smith (who didn’t line up where they had him…right?) and I bet Smith only hits side netting on that same shot once in every half dozen attempts (but prove me wrong, kid; prove me wrong). Now, the worrying thing…

The Revolution equalized 15 minutes later and in a way that highlighted one of Portland’s regular weaknesses (see Stray No. 5), but I was less concerned by that than how close Portland came to stumbling into a five-minute fall apart, i.e., one of those back-to-back goal, multi-goal, bed-shitting breakdowns that sees a game slip away from a team. Just two (or three) minutes after Luca Langoni finished around a firmly-seated Kamal Miller, New England’s Peyton Miller teed up Leo Campana for a simple, short finish that would have handed them the lead. Per the final score, Campana skied it, thereby sparing Portland from chasing the game.

Portland Timbers Weekly, The Toronto Flop, the State of Things, the Smell of Chowda

I've tried everything. This xG is just too small.

At this (roughly) middle point in the Portland Timbers 2025 season, I hold the following to be more or less absolutely true:

1) the Timbers aren’t going to win the Supporters’ Shield;

2) the first team isn’t trophy-competitive and I don’t see anything on the current roster or in Phil Neville’s brain changing that; and

3) things aren’t actually going well at the moment.

If any here bearing witness object to #1, speak now or forever hold your piece and what drug does it take to produce hope on that scale? Even half-serious pushback on #2 would surprise me, but crazier things and so on. Which leaves #3…

Toronto FC 0-3 Portland Timbers
About the Game
A fucking disaster. A loss for the memory-hole. Something that – and this is with a nod to #3 – I still don't believe could have happened. Again, that's "could" not "should."

I braced for an off-day, I got soccer’s version of ennui. The Timbers went down early after an eager-puppy foul by Omir Fernandez led to a free kick for Toronto at the top of the 18. The gifts continued to flow when James Pantemis decided to become Second Wall, aka, the wall behind the wall, instead of covering the other half of the goal. Nothing of note improved from there for Portland. They ended the game with just four (fucking) shots, none on goal, and xG so small it couldn’t be seen by the naked eye.

For whatever reason, possibly because I finally ran out of words, I’m going to forego the typical blow-by-blow match reports. If you want to know, ask me about it in the comments or on Bluesky and I’ll flesh it out, but the short version amounts to the idea that they provide a snapshot of limited value. Relive them through the highlights if you gotta, also why?  Ahem. Wrapping up the game.

Orlando City SC 1-0 Portland Timbers: Hitting a Speedbump, Hitting a Speedbump, Hitting a Spee...

A celebration of a great, perhaps useless design.

Neither a lot to get excited about, nor much to fret over. The Portland Timbers traveled to Orlando City SC and lost a slow, sweaty, tired affair 1-0, a result that, for me, differed from expectations by only a goal or two in Orlando’s favor. To be clear, that was my sense going in. Let’s move on to what actually happened.

About the Game
Orlando got on Portland early and Timbers players did their part to pile pressure on themselves with loose giveaways. The weight of it didn’t translate into much more than a few shots from range, with the best falling to (fortunately) left back David Brekalo and (less so), Luis Muriel. Santiago Moreno fired Portland’s best, early-ish shot with a Short Olimpico (i.e., it knuckled to near-post) and Kevin Kelsy crowned their first half attacking effort with a shot that was more wise than good (46th minute, came closer to the top row than Pedro Gallese’s goal mouth). Sadly, those efforts came on either side of Orlando’s one and only goal of the game, scored by Duncan McGuire off a slick Eduard Atuesta slip pass. Portland’s defenders shared the burden of that goal fairly equally – e.g., who’s to blame more between the three-to-four dudes stepping to Atuesta while (the theretofore great) and Jimer Fory and Finn Surman leaving a wide lane for McGuire between them – and that left Portland’s attack the burden of finding the equalizer. Or at least that’s one way this game could have played out…

Per the official stats, Orlando topped the Timbers by 2-to-1 on the basic attacking stats and (somehow) tripled them for xG…but they never looked much like adding a second goal. I just reviewed the full highlights to see whether there was some great chance or moment I forgot, but the Lions never found much better than aspirational over the second half and they didn’t even find that often. Sadly, the Timbers never really found third gear either – David Da Costa might have had their best chance of their seven (that's 7) total on the night, but that amounted to 2/3 a chance, at best. Unfun reminder, that leaves Portland on just 12 shots over their past two games.

To give them some credit, Portland had the better of play over the second 45 minutes. By the 60th minute, Orlando shipped them as many turnovers as the Timbers sent the other way over the opening 30 minutes of the first half. Portland held the ball better, even if they didn’t always know how to get more out of holding onto it, and they managed to pin Orlando into their own half, it a little further from goal. They even had a reasonable shout for a penalty when 2nd-half sub, Ariel Lassiter, got around Brekalo, but the referee waved it away after seeing the tip of the defender’s toenail catch the ball after passing through Lassiter. As with the game, that “missed call” tracked as neither a lot to get excited about, nor much to fret over. I’ll get to the bigger fish to fry after…

Portland Timbers 1-1 Seattle Sounders: It Was the [BLANK] of Times

I think cuffs and collars matched. You?

Just to note it, these posts should get shorter the deeper we go into Major League Soccer’s 2025 regular season. Barring new signings in the summer, at some point in any season, the teams have what they have when it comes to the competence of their coach and the quality of their players, strong suits and weak links will be well-known in their equal parts.

Have the Portland Timbers reached that point at…hold on…14 games into the season? Here and there, maybe, but not overall? Nah. Let’s get to it…

About the Game
I didn’t clock how few shots the Timbers fired in Saturday’s 1-1 draw versus the Seattle Sounders until checking the final stats (still catching up, still not wholly connected to the game-day experience). Not what one wants to see in terms of offensive output, obviously, but it didn’t translate into the vague chatter I’d caught here and there about Portland being lucky to escape a loss. The Sounders found their chances – particularly from the low-to-mid 30s when the long ball to Danny Musovski and Roy…er, Ryan Kent was very much on (hold this thought) – but the final score didn’t look like they borrowed it from another game or anything, cuffs and collars matched, etc. Still, seeing just five shots total and knowing at least one of those counted as more hopeful than likely (e.g., Santiago Moreno’s at the 22nd) sets a fan to fretting about the latest drop-off on the attacking side (unless my math’s mistaken, the Timbers have been good for ¾ goal/game since the beginning of May). Per the tone of all the above, Seattle hardly piled on the chances, but I’ve already gotten ahead of myself.

Seeing Kamal Miller in a foot race with, oh, 65% of the league generally spells trouble and seeing Musovski win the decisive one felt inevitable. To his credit, Miller stalled a full breakout and Finn Surman did well to put himself between Albert Rusnak and Maxime Crepeau’s goal…only to tragically leave the five-hole open for Rusnak to shoot through. Seeing a similar play almost come off for a second Seattle goal got a couple dings out of the alarm bell, but Crepeau had a better angle to block Musovski’s shot and got down righteously to cover it. Portland hadn’t been helpless to that point - Juan David Mosquera’s solo/run shot at the 9th minute announced…a presence - but it took most of the half for them to build an attack that misdirected the Sounders defense. Maybe the surprise came from David Da Costa switching to the right, maybe it came from getting the ball behind Seattle’s midfield in one pass; whatever happened, the Sounders defense lost track of Da Costa and Moreno in rapid succession and paid the price with an easy equalizer that, despite credible efforts here and there, they never got around to erasing.

Portland Timbers 1-0 Sporting Kansas City: A Result

Taking miracles, in whatever form.

I’m weighing the game I wanted, maybe even expected, against the game that I got. That’s not taking me to dark places, exactly, and for reasons I’ll lay out, or perhaps just accept, below.

Conflicted feels like the right adjective for my thoughts on the Portland Timbers' 1-0 win over – to start picking at it – (still) 12th-place Sporting Kansas City, and yet it doesn’t. With that, let’s pop this zit.

About the Game
Control of the game, so long as you use the word loosely, slipped away from the Timbers at some point in this game. The question is when – and, to be clear, only when. Despite my headful of quibbles with this or that detail or player, the thought of Portland losing never crossed my mind. Pissing away two points, on the other hand, never left the table. Even that thought leaves things to unpack.

I saw three phases in the game, each bleeding into the next. With David Da Costa (typed that as David Dad Costa, kinda liked that) and Santiago Moreno buzzing under Felipe Mora, the Timbers got off to a good start. Antony produced the first big moment for either team with a diagonal run across the box and it came after a build up that felt sustainable. Portland put all of the same things together, and more, in the build-up to the, to call it by its full name, Brilliant and Only Goal of the game at the 10th minute: they worked the ball in, they pushed it up the left, moved it right, switched it back to the left, pushing SKC back the entire time; after, oh, 15-20 passes, it took a buffet of luck, timing and inspiration for Da Costa and Moreno (respectively) to score the winner and, by that, all three points, I hereby give thanks. Thus endeth Phase 1.

You know that moment in a track-‘n’-field relay, when the runner of the next leg gets up to speed in front of the runner from the previous one to build up momentum for the handoff? That was the change between Phase 1 and Phase 2. Sporting KC started finding direct passes through Portland’s lines around the same time the space for Da Costa and Moreno dried up. Their best chance(s) – perhaps for the entire game – came at the beginning of that phase in the form of three shots on Maxime Crepeau’s goal, most by Daniel Salloi, around the 15th minute. Crepeau made those saves and more, if without the confidence I like seeing from a ‘keeper (another came around the 61st minute, see the full highlights), but that didn’t chip away at my confidence in the result as the low-key siege SKC mounted against the Timbers defense for the remainder of Phase 2. Which brings this post to the most complicated part of the game, though not yet to Phase 3.

Los Angeles Galaxy 2-4 Portland Timbers: The Sweet, Possibly Misplaced Scent of Potential

The Portland Timbers might be actually be…like, good this season. On evidence of everything, up to and including tonight’s game, the Los Angeles Galaxy is not a good team, so that bold stretch has less to do with the specific result of the Timbers beating the Galaxy 4-2 in LA, or even Portland’s current six unbeaten, four-game winning streak than the loud “clicking” sounds coming off the pitch every time they play…can the Timbers Army do Beatnik snap applause loud enough for the field mics to pick up?

About the Game
I can best sum up the first half by saying the game's first shot on goal went in, Timbers 1-0 at the half. Some good things happened – e.g., Finn Surman and Joao “Big First Step” Ortiz combining to contain a palpably eager Joseph Paintsil – but the game rarely rose higher than a flailing stalemate over the opening 45 minutes until Antony ran down a Santiago Moreno looping cross, turned with it, chipped over his defender and teed up David Da Costa for that lonely goal. Real one-eyed-man-in-the-land-of-the-blind stuff, basically, and then the halftime whistle sounded. The Galaxy came out as something like the same team – which, factually, they were – but Portland came out of the locker room transformed, as if inspired by a speech, the abrupt realization that they’d survived the worst, or both, and commenced to play the confident, connected soccer that savvy fans pay to see and swoon over. Just after the 50th minute, the Timbers went from besieging the Galaxy’s defensive third to an organized retreat after a turnover to scoring a slick insurance goal at the 53rd minute by the foot of Santiago Moreno: the three-to-four minute sequence that proceeded it might have been the most “soccer” soccer Portland has played all season, just checking all the boxes on how the manage and win a game. With the game slipping away, Greg Vanney gambled on a mass substitution – a shift change that included Marco “Chekhov’s Gun” Reus – but the same all-star team that created Portland’s second goal did themselves one better on their third. Even with my money on Kevin Kelsy skying that shot eight times out of ten, he capped a stellar, “yes, and” counter run up the left by David Da Costa and Antony with a net-bursting first-time shot (oof, may have to check the full highlights) that, despite a couple hiccups, buried the game. As everyone who tuned in knows, the Galaxy pulled back two goals in three minutes – the first on the kind of play that made LA so lethal just one season ago, the second due to a mixture of magic and missing the obvious – and that momentary lapse in bowel control sullied what would otherwise have been a “happy Halloween, we are here, motherfuckers” kind of performance. Instead, it staggered into…let’s call it a karaoke version of the same line. Which brings me to my favorite part of the game…

Portland Timbers 3-3 Los Angeles FC: A Daydream, Shattered

A whole lot of "ohmm," till Bouanga fucked it up.

Tough nut to name, really. Walnut? Pecan? What delicious, high protein nut best…embodies tonight’s tantalizing 3-3 draw at Providence Park versus Los Angeles FC? I’m going with pistachio, because those fuckers can be hard to crack.

About the Game
The full highlights haven’t been posted as I type (nvm, went up as I typed), so I’m leaning into bare chronology on this, but one simply can’t escape the feeling that the Portland Timbers let a couple points slip through their toes tonight (game played with the feet, etc.). After going up by two goals – the first, a (deserved) penalty kick earned and (dare I say symbolically?) scored by Felipe Mora, the second, a plum of a finish by Santiago Moreno on an attacking move that typified the night* – the Timbers looked as steady and assured as I’ve seen them all season. Olivier Giroud scoring his first goal of 2025 on the stroke of halftime didn’t change that impression, coming out of the back-side of the blue as it did, and I spent the first half of the second half daydreaming about how I would characterize a home win over an LAFC side that has struggled early and traveled poorly over the opening weeks of 2025. The gap between David Martinez’s equalizer and Felipe Mora’s go-ahead goal**gave me a mere two minutes to second guess that daydream, so I, for lack of a better phrase, drifted back into a space that felt one glorious hell of a lot like the first half of the super-fun roller-coaster good-times of the 2024 season. Despite disturbing signs from the outside – my handwritten notes back up the final allotment shots/shots-on-goal in the official stats - that pleasant fog enveloped me all the way until somewhere around the 90th minute, when Diego Chara caught Denis Bouanga’s toe in the area, Portland's favorite referee, Guido Gonzalez, Jr., pointed to the spot and Bouanga leveled the game with a stone-cold penalty kick. Don’t know why the danger signs didn’t flash earlier, or why I didn’t see them if they did. Maybe I was blinded by the Pants over my eyes…

…have I mentioned that LAFC probably should have gone up 1-0 by the second minute? This was a wild one, soccer’s version of a feeding frenzy, if until Portland’s second go-ahead goal. To float a theory/response: is it possible Portland taking their foot off the gas doomed them to the draw? Against that, did they have the legs to do otherwise?

Colorado Rapids 0-3 Portland Timbers: Comfortable in Commerce City

When you feel confident, you can do anything...

Think I mentioned this on Bluesky, but some dude on subreddit (who heard it from a friend of a friend’s co-worker, who heard it from her boss) floated the argument that the Portland Timbers were better than they earned after four games. Between Kamal Miller’s (stupid fucking) red card in Game 1 and the ref getting drunkenly novel with the concept of “advantage” in Game 4, they'd tripped themselves more than they'd been tripped, basically.

Did Timbers fans just get proof of concept with yesterday’s subtly lopsided 3-0 win at the Colorado Rapids, or…

About the Game
As happens more often than I’d like to admit, the Scouting Report I posted on…think it was Friday, but who cares because it went out the window within the first 20 minutes. The Colorado Rapids played like a constipated shadow of the team I’d watched from afar and the Portland Timbers looked – and, to be clear, this feels like a typo as I’m tapping it out…capable. We didn’t get seamless perfection by any means – see Jimer Fory at a dead sprint toward his own goal to corral an eighth-minute breakaway by Kevin Cabral (hold that thought*) and Finn Surman eating the entire fake Djordje Mihailovic baited him with at the edge of the fucking six – but the one, literally massive thing that stood out was how immediately calm and connected the Timbers looked playing out of the back. David Ayala offering himself as a first option and seeming to have a plan for his first pass went a long damn way with that; whether turning out of the pressure, dropping the ball to someone behind, who then played it forward to either Ayala or another option (Santiago Moreno, often as not), Portland had fewer problems playing out of back than they have so far in this young season. The defensive shape held up pretty well too, if with an assist from whatever the hell was going on with Rapids; I saw no evidence of the movement and connectivity I’d come to expect after watching 90 minutes of them for the Scouting Report. The Timbers looked, for lack of a better word, comfortable for the first time in 2025 – even when Colorado upped the pressure. The Rapids found a couple chances, here and there, mostly through Reggie “Grumpy” Cannon firing unchecked crosses from the right, but a state of disconnection plagued them through most of the game. With the game knotted on zeroes and the ref puckering up for the halftime whistle, the breakthrough finally came. After trying to play through the brick the Rapids dropped in front of their goal, someone hopefully played the ball wide to David Da Costa. When he kicked the ball back into the mixer, just as hopefully, it caught Josh Atencio’s ankle and bobbled into the Rapids’ goal. And thank gods for that, because, per the official statisticians (aka, the broadcast team) zero shots had been fired on goal, in anger or otherwise, to that point. That first goal opened the game, as goals by the road team often do, and the Rapids lost little time in making a second and worse mistake to allow Portland's second. For whatever reason, three defenders lumped around Felipe Mora like he was [Insert Global Star Name] and their left-sided defender drifting to cover Eric Miller (just…why, and hold that thought%) and that left Antony footloose and fancy-free up the middle of the field and, I assume, a little baffled at his good fortune before slotting home the insurance goal that the Timbers ultimately did not need. That goal arrived just prior to the 50th minute, but it effectively ended the game as a contest. With a nod to the final xG in the official stats – just to note/celebrate it, the Timbers broke the elusive 1.0 xG barrier for the first time in 2025 yesterday - Colorado’s stats aren’t wildly off the Timbers’. And yet the question of which was the better team isn’t so much as half open. The question is why?

A 2024 Portland Timbers Post-Mortem: Entertaining the Possibility It Really Was That Bad

Let the image go blurry...you'll see Raffi, I promise.

As I sit down to write this, I’m not even sure that I can see around the crushing 0-5 “home” loss to the visiting Vancouver Whitecaps in the play-in to the 2024 playoffs. (Play-in to the playoffs; that had to be deliberate, right?) One could even make a case that looking past that result amounts to a demand to misread the 2024 season, to treat it as something other than a failure or, as yet another “transition season.” That last rock gets kicked around a little more below, not least because I'm no longer sure that still applies, but when your team only “makes the playoffs” through a bloated invitation list, then passes out and collectively shits themselves an hour into it? Don’t worry, I’m not even going to try to find that image…enjoy an image from a more wholesome metaphor...

Something else that’s in my head as I type this: because 2024 was my first full season on the Timbers subreddit, I have a lot more voices rattling around up there. That’s not all bad, of course – a broader perspective is good! – but digging through any accumulation of detail(/clutter) inevitably pushes you toward the trees side of the forest/trees equation and this just feels like a moment to focus on the forest, maybe figure out why all those fucking trees caught on fire all season long?

That absorption on detail expressed itself in a singular way this season, if just for me (and, obviously, nobody pushed me into all those subreddit rabbit-holes) – i.e., a loose perception that every player on the team was, in so many words, more or less fine. To be clear, yes, people on the Timbers sub-reddit (hereafter, “Over There”) did eventually start naming names – e.g., Zac McGraw ain’t doing so good, even if Kamal Miller’s making that a contest, and some dude Over There mounted what started as a lonely campaign calling for James Pantemis to start over Maxime Crepeau and, for all the doubt, even ridicule that guy endured…Pantemis did, in fact, take over the starting job – but just about every player had their champion, many of them for as long as the season lasted. When faced with a team that finished 9th in the West, aka, hanging on by a rotted toe, that cheering section shouldn't exist. Call it a paradox, call an argument for firing the coach, or just some specific coaches, or for firing the general manager, but just the loose sentiment says more about how fandom works than anything about the Timbers’ 2024 season.

Vancouver Whitecaps 1-1 Portland Timbers: I Accept This Result, I Love This Result

This can't be anything but disorienting.

The Portland Timbers rolled out of Vancouver with a point after last night’s 1-1 draw at BC Place. Based on a quick little spin around the Timbers subreddit, I liked this result more than others, maybe even more than I should. I’ll defend that choice between now and the end, but first…

The Very Basics
The Vancouver Whitecaps went up 1-0 with the opening whistle still echoing around the stadium (c’mon, roll with it). If the Timbers had hoped to ease their way into the game, the shock of Brian White’s ever-so-early (and unnervingly easy) goal hit them like a bucket of ice water waking them from sleep. The shock of it carried over the opening 15-20 minutes of the game: no Portland player seemed to know where he should be and where he should go from there. The “shock” metaphor seems especially apt because once the Timbers woke all the way up, they took hold of the game and, but for one “this fucking game” moment (Andres Cubas pinging Maxime Crepeau’s left post in second half stoppage), they never let go of it. Portland’s confidence grew side-by-side with the quality of their chance creation – i.e., Antony’s solo-run/desperate flail from the right to Juan David Mosquera firing from a seam up the middle to Santiago Moreno forcing Yohei Takaoka to save off a freekick - until Rodriguez crowned the recovery on his second bite of the apple with a deflected equalizer (his first bite was offside, sadly). The second half was all Timbers (the official stats can go to Hell), with Portland turning 50/50s into 70/30s all over the field and cutting off 90% of the paths out of Vancouver’s half. Had Takaoka’s left post not kept out Felipe Mora’s picture-perfect header, I’d bet my left leg (the bad one, fwiw) that the Timbers would be in 7th this morning.

What’s to Love
To anyone feeling blue about two points (arguably) slipping away, I’d respond with this: which team do you think feels better about not just last night’s result, but last night’s game? Sure, Vancouver punched their ticket to the post-season, but would you rather be the team ruing a slow start and 20 wasted minutes or the team trying to figure out 60+ minutes of getting played off your own pitch – and with three more crucial home games to go? The larger context only makes it worse for the 'Caps: the Timbers have defeated playoff-competitive teams since the Leagues Cup break, while the ‘Caps haven’t beat one since early July (Minnesota, on the road), or even June (Colorado, at home; Minnesota was flailing under the playoff line when the ‘Caps beat them in July). Even if you lean into the argument that Portland can only win at home, last night’s draw with the wild road draw at RSL behind it shows the Timbers getting results that, by the grace of penalty kicks, can become playoff wins. Finally, Portland has the comfort of knowing how they measure up against playoff-bound teams: both Portland and Vancouver have gone 4-3-3 over their past ten games, but the Timbers have played seven playoff-bound teams versus just four for Vancouver. That script will flip over the next two games for Portland and the next three for Vancouver – the Timbers play Austin then Dallas, while Vancouver hosts Seattle, Minnesota and LAFC – and that makes the two points separating them look at little smaller. And yet, neither team had all hands on deck…

St. Louis CITY FC 3-1 Portland Timbers: A Loss and the Rest of the Season

Never, ever forget: the pig enjoys it.

I sat on posting this for a number of reasons – everything from still mulling it over to feeling like I didn’t have anything to say beyond, “say, that didn’t go well,” to feeling like a carcass Saturday morning – but the primary reason I took a breath for putting up a post about the Portland Timbers' 1-3 loss at St. Louis CITY (wNbc!) FC was this: I thought they played reasonably well given the givens…

…the secondary reason was a plan to shift to weekly, more context-rich posts (we’ll see how that goes). At any rate…

I took the usual time to tip through the subreddits – e.g., posts about how hard (and deep) Portland sucks on the road, how hard the defense shits the sheets, how everything would have been better had Evander not limped off…let’s go with disturbingly early (no low-hanging updates on that, btw) – and all those arguments and talking points make enough sense. And yet…

“Combative; looks like a foul-free war”

“midfield/middle of field, total melee”

Those rhyming phrases slipped into the notes I took during the game, 60 minutes apart. Between that and re-reading my post from Portland’s goal-less draw at St. Louis earlier this season, this Leagues Cup tilt delivered the game I expected. St. Louis disrupts more than they play, which makes them hell to play through: “forcing turnovers in advantageous places” (aka, pig-wrestling) has made them the MLS team they are today, for good (2023!) or ill (2024! probably!). Sure, Portland struggled to connect passes, but what is that but the whole damn point of that approach?

And, yes, any fan wants to see his/her/their local team play through that – but that’s exactly where I took comfort in the loss. Portland created enough chances to win – they even had two bites at scoring first (e.g., Juan David Mosquera somewhere around the 30th and Jonathan Rodriguez’s how-the-fuck-did-that-guy-miss chance at the back post (has to be in here, right?) – but they didn’t make them count. In defense of anyone ripping his/her/their hair about how few total chances Portland created, the official stats put a very real cap on how hard I can push back on that point, but the Timbers could have ridden Claudio Bravo’s gods-kissed banger to a draw, but for…well, St. Louis doing something like the same.

Los Angeles Galaxy 3-2 Portland Timbers: The Good, the Bad, That Pet You Lost When You Were 10

R.I.P.

I’m choosing to read last night’s 2-3 loss at the Los Angeles Galaxy through a very particular lens. The Portland Timbers’ performance was…let’s go with fell short of stirring. A lot of I had to do with energy or just vibes, generally - i.e., if had one 100 random soccer fans sit through that game, none of them knowing which team had played the Wednesday before, and asked at the end who did, I’m guessing north of 70 would have pointed to the Timbers. Moreover, the fact the Galaxy started all the same forward players (i.e., the front six) for nearly the whole game makes that mythical tally looks 50% worse.

So, yeah, a front six on half-a-week’s rest put three goals past James Pantemis and, stats be damned, repeatedly got goal side of Portland’s defenders and midfielders. That they strayed offside about half the time saved the Timbers from a runaway. Or did it? The game ended with xG at 1.9 for LA and 1.7 for the Timbers, after all…I’m still deciding how much that tracks. [UPDATE: those numbers have been updated (or I read 'em wrong/tipsy): LA remains on 1.9, but Portland ended with 2.0.] Moving on…

A Summary
Portland came out looking fully prepared to go toe-to-toe at the Galaxy – and, for the first 20 minutes, that worked(!). Both teams fired warning shots over the first ten minutes, but, as the clocked ticked upward, the heavier fire came from LA’s direction. The Timbers snatched chances here and there – e.g., Santiago Moreno with a smart scoop from range at the 30th, Evander crashing the near post ~sixteen minutes later (did both make the highlights?) – but the Galaxy got a hold of the passing lanes starting around the 25th minute and the questions got heavier for the Timbers defense from there, particularly through Riqui Puig, Mark Delgado and Gabriel Pec prowling up the right.

Not coincidentally, and yet controversially, LA’s breakthrough came up the same side when Joseph Paintsil slipped behind a Timbers’ high line that wantonly flirted with danger and, together, he and Pec outran the Timbers backline for the depressingly easy goal that put the Galaxy up 1-0. If you mosey over to the Timbers subreddit, you’ll find a couple threads seething about Paintsil being offside and, having reviewed the video, I dissent (and, no, you won’t change my mind, not without really impressive graphics). More to the point, much like your gerbil/goldish/hermit crab, etc. that died when you were 10, maybe even under mysterious circumstances, that goal isn’t coming back. The pertinent question was how the Timbers would respond.

Portland Timbers 3-0 Real Salt Lake: Superior Kung Fu

Cat v. Spider-Monkey style?

Well. I’ll be…

The Portland Timbers went wire-to-wire in last night’s 3-0 win over a visiting (and leggy?) Real Salt Lake team that, at the time of first kicking, 10 more points than the Timbers. This win, more than any of the five(!) that came before it over the past six games, felt like a real announcement, a throwing down of the gauntlet, and a warning to the once-betters that used to have to look a ways down the table to see the Portland…

…just to note it, but the Seattle Sounders are on a streak one-point hotter than Portland’s and the Vancouver Whitecaps kicked the shit out of St. Louis CITY FC, leaving those teams one and two points behind the Timbers, respectively. Celebrate the win, by all means, but do keep a close eye on the rearview.

A Summary
I’d barely formed an opinion on the tifo (good one, guys!) when a very much in-form Santiago Moreno wrecked the left side of RSL’s defense by spinning around a double team and behind the defense. That left him with plenty of traffic ahead, but Felipe Mora cut through it with a run in front of Brayan Vera and beat Zac McMath at the near-post. The game went into management mode for the rest of the first half – which, here, means RSL working the ball around the filed; capably; again, this is a good team who does that well – and Portland punching back in transition. A couple shots excepted – going with a break that almost broke through for RSL and a back-post chance Jonathan Rodriguez should have hit better – it boiled down to one team’s kung fu against another’s.

For what feels like the…let’s go with tenth time this season, the Timbers came out of the halftime locker room swinging (whatever you’re doing in there, Phil, whether it’s motivational speaking, a drum circle, a special kind of incense, bumps of blow, keep doing it, man!). At the very beginning of the second half, they knocked once before barging through the door with a second goal of the night, one that rode the ragged line between elaborate and absurdist. It’s a goal for Timbers fans to celebrate because they finally scored one through one of their patented three-to-four-extra-touches specials.

Portland Timbers 4-1 Nashville SC: Maybe We Can Have Nice Things?!

IYKYK

Just not hat tricks. Hey-OH!

Jonathan Rodriguez’s failure to top the brace he’d built through the middle of the first half with a hat trick turned to slapstick by the end of the game. Fuck it. So long as the Portland Timbers win enough games without them, I can lay down for my final rest with nothing left to check in that particular box.

For those who didn’t watch, the Timbers straight-up ran over Nashville SC tonight with a 4-0 win at Providence Park. If I had to name a defining moment for the night, I’d go with the “HOLY SHIT” huddle Nashville ‘keeper Joe Willis called after Portland’s fourth goal went into the (or his) bottom left corner for the second time.

The only real question to ask about tonight: at what precise moment did the point of analyzing this game leave the building? After the third goal? The fourth? The (holy shit, justified!) red card? (Which is in here somewhere, or better be.) If there’s a story besides the game slipping away from Nashville five three-to-four minutes at a time between the game’s 18th and 35th minutes, I couldn’t name it.

It was fun and all – which was genuinely nice, not to mention fresh – but, no, the only thing to talk about is how hard Nashville fell on their faces. To wit…

Portland scored its first goal on a turnover and by capitalizing on a literal 4-v-2.

Daniel Lovitz/Nashville gambled everything on cutting off Juan David Mosquera’s escape and, failing at that, the Timbers scored their second goal in a 4-v-3 with Eryk Williamson with all of time and space to command from the right.

Portland Timbers 3-2 Minnesota United FC: Some Wild, Wholly Appropriate Shit

Behold, the "fairy tales gone bad" universe.

First, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an xG of 5.0 and, having watched this one live, I need to see MLS’s math on that. That doesn’t mean the Portland Timbers didn’t earn last night’s glorious, dramatic, come-from-behind, instant-classic 3-2 win over Minnesota United FC; that just points to how perilously close they came to fucking up the fairy-tale ending Timbers fans demanded.

The “fairy tale” piece of that relates less to the win than giving a proper send-off to long-time fan-favorite Dairon Asprilla, who played his last game in Portland Timbers green last night. I figure I’m irrelevant enough at this point to confess that I still don’t get Asprilla-mania. I do, however, accept that a genuinely stunning number of fans love him to pieces and I appreciate that love, perhaps more than the man himself. He’ll probably never make it to the Timbers’ Ring of Honor, but it somehow feels like he should; he transmuted from player to local lore over time, and in a way I doubt anyone could locate during the ten seasons he wore Timbers green (or, just as often, those rose-colored kits they wouldn’t stop wearing last season). If there’s a secret password to true Timbers fandom, I’m guessing Dairon Asprilla is part of the formula.

The fact it took some time for Portland to get going and back into last night’s game felt like a fitting tribute to The Man of the Hour (who took 5-6 seasons to bloom) – though, honestly, the first half was less about the Timbers playing like shit than going down by two goals, one of them fortunate, the other the bastard-child of a dumb mistake. For as much as they struggled to find the net and paths thereto, Portland created a couple good looks early and had players (with Felipe Mora carrying the banner) making the most out of half-chances. That doesn’t mean waving away what might have been had Minnesota not had a third goal pulled back for offside toward the end of the first half (gotta be in here, right?). That’s more about acknowledging that the general vibe wasn’t nearly as dire as it felt up to the penalty kick – earned by Mora, scored by Evander – that shoved Portland’s big toe back into the game; in keeping with that exotic xG, they had an entire foot in for most of the game.

A damned sturdy Clint Irwin made the first of his eight saves(!) immediately before the penalty kick he couldn’t keep out and, as the second half progressed, talk of wave-after-wave or pressure from the Timbers slips into the broadcast. With Minnesota barely able to get out of their own half by somewhere around the 60th minute, they game turned into a test of how much pressure the Loons could bear before they cracked and, finally, broke.

The Loss v Charlotte FC, Wailing, Lamentations, and Acceptance

The cruelest serving.

You ever get to the end of a long-form math equation only to realize that you did something wrong somewhere and wound up with the wrong result? That’s what the past three match reports I’ve posted (here, here, and here) feel like after the Portland Timbers fucking bummer of a 0-2 loss at Charlotte FC. I’ll get return to the math problem, but let’s start by wrapping up what happened last Saturday with the brevity it deserves.

I don’t see the point of breaking this game down because the work of litigating what went wrong feels like writing the same thing for the…how many games has Portland played in 2024? Eleven? So, yeah, but for some time off early last month, I’d be flagging a lot of the same issues for the eleventh time.

Face-planting disasters in defense? Check! Hell, the Timbers got a two-fer-one out of Zac McGraw last Saturday (see all the way below for links). Struggles with ball progression? Covered! Not on the same page? They weren’t even reading the same goddamn book. It was so bad (how bad was it?), Charlotte’s Enzo Copetti scored a goal in open play. Timbers fans got a brimming plateful of more of the same, basically, only without the thrill of a late rally or the pain of watching an early lead slip away. Another week of dining in Hell’s cafeteria…

Over those past three match reports, I’ve pointed to a green shoot here (Felipe Mora’s back!), a bright spot there (the Timbers’ first complete game of 2024!), and maybe even sprinkled some fairy dust around both to brighten them up a little (Evander will know what to do!). Again, and I cannot possibly stress this enough, the set of problems outlined above has appeared in some form or another in every game this season and the sum of the green shoots + bright spots – (the same problems X 11) = 12th in Major League Soccer’s Western Conference and 24th overall.

Where is the line between looking past bad results and ignoring them? Is it still a green shoot if it doesn’t grow?