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| Straight up Umbrella Academy, man... |
There isn’t really much to say about the Portland Timbers' 0-3 loss to dread rivals, the Seattle Sounders. If I had to liken it to anything, I’d go with high-stakes arm-wrestling (e.g., the good kind, where arms come off) or most tug-o-wars: basically, a contest that stays in balance for some length of time - about 70 minutes in this case - only to have things unravel very, very badly for one side or the other…
…this time, sadly, the Timbers were the team that unraveled. It’s in the way that you use it, or something like that. It comes and it goes…
All in all, this was your usual classic, tight rivalry affair, a game in which neither team took any real advantage until one team (again, Seattle) took all the advantages. The only real question - and it’s one larded in 500 pounds of bacon fat - is whether or not this worries Timbers fans in the near or short term…of which, near as I can tell, most Portland fans don’t even believe in a long-term - i.e., they believe COVID will fell the season before any meaningful resolution arrives - e.g., an MLS Cup, if one weighted to the bottom of the sea.
The long-term side of the equation deals in the simplest question of all: how big an obstacle does this Seattle team make on the way to…whatever happens at the end of an actually successful MLS 2020, assuming one even happens? And that’s where the rubber really hits the road: even post-Chad Marshall, post-Kim Yee-Hee, and without the (ever dubious) Javier Arreaga, the Sounders arrived in Providence Park as their usual, damnable, stubborn selves. They generally try to pace the game, trusting a succession of reliable defenses to give them time to experiment, while they let the attacking talent sort it out. Which they did - or rather, he did, with he being RaulRuidiaz (and then he got the secondary assist on the Seattle’s…reinsurance(?) goal), and, honestly, I could stop writing right here and you’d know nearly everything relevant about this game. Again, this was two good teams standing off until one of them broke through, at which point it became the team that broke through punishing the trailing team for trying. Oldest story in soccer, people…
…this time, sadly, the Timbers were the team that unraveled. It’s in the way that you use it, or something like that. It comes and it goes…
All in all, this was your usual classic, tight rivalry affair, a game in which neither team took any real advantage until one team (again, Seattle) took all the advantages. The only real question - and it’s one larded in 500 pounds of bacon fat - is whether or not this worries Timbers fans in the near or short term…of which, near as I can tell, most Portland fans don’t even believe in a long-term - i.e., they believe COVID will fell the season before any meaningful resolution arrives - e.g., an MLS Cup, if one weighted to the bottom of the sea.
The long-term side of the equation deals in the simplest question of all: how big an obstacle does this Seattle team make on the way to…whatever happens at the end of an actually successful MLS 2020, assuming one even happens? And that’s where the rubber really hits the road: even post-Chad Marshall, post-Kim Yee-Hee, and without the (ever dubious) Javier Arreaga, the Sounders arrived in Providence Park as their usual, damnable, stubborn selves. They generally try to pace the game, trusting a succession of reliable defenses to give them time to experiment, while they let the attacking talent sort it out. Which they did - or rather, he did, with he being RaulRuidiaz (and then he got the secondary assist on the Seattle’s…reinsurance(?) goal), and, honestly, I could stop writing right here and you’d know nearly everything relevant about this game. Again, this was two good teams standing off until one of them broke through, at which point it became the team that broke through punishing the trailing team for trying. Oldest story in soccer, people…
