MLS Off-Season Weekly: Comings, Goings, Expansion

A statement on one team I follow...

“If you take the best part of Europe and the best part of North America, you’re arriving in Montreal.”
- Thierry Henry

I think I spoke my little piece about Henry coming to coach L’Impact Montreal (wait, see, and hope for the best), but the man knows how to work a crowd. For what it’s worth, seeing Montreal pick up Ignacio Piatti’s option for another year, at age 35 (come April) and after he limped all the way through 2019.

That, of course, was one of hundreds, even millions of moves in a week that started with the Expansion Draft and ended with roster deadline day. Teams across Major League Soccer protected the players they wanted to keep and sent the rest out to play in the rain for a while where strangers can line up to gawk at them, maybe even make an indecent proposal or two. Some trades went on under all that, and some players stepped into the square work-force (aka, retired). I’ll touch on some big picture stuff at the end – e.g., notes on the first drafts turned in by Nashville SC and Inter Miami CF, then some stray notes about the house-cleaning, etc. – but the balance of this will talk about the two teams I follow, FC Cincinnati and the Portland Timbers. I’m going to start with Portland, because the tea leaves around Cincinnati all over the goddamn place, even outside the damn tea cup.

Before getting to that, I want to restate/rename a personal rule that I try to follow when new players come into a team: you cannot know how well or poorly any new player will do in MLS until they do it, and that’s regardless of how much your team paid for the player, or where that player was before. I hereby rename this the "Brian Fernandez Rule." Got it? Good. Time to dig in.

Timbers: Special Friends, Coming and Going
First, the Timbers signed a 27-year-old Croatian centerback named Dario Zuparic, and they might sign a 20-year-old Venezuelan right back named Pablo Bonilla. I predict neither success nor failure for either player (two Brian Fernandezes), but I will say that I expect more of Zuparic. He’s actually signed, obviously, but Portland needs either stability or an upgrade at his position (please?) and it’s always encouraging to see a steady history of deployment (e.g., 88 starts, 97 appearances, out of ~152+ games for Pescara). If the Timbers do sign Bonilla, I’d set expectations to emotional self-preservation – especially for 2020 – because the youth revolution rolls slowly in Portland. Still, he’d fulfill a need as well…let the mourning begin…

Portland Timbers 1-2 Seattle Sounders: Fuller Than Your Average Evening

That flag only hurts fascists and snowflakes.

Last night was a weird one, no question. The Iron Front protest happened, of course, and few things surprised me more than seeing not just an Iron Front flag waving, but a big, gigantic motherfucker of an Iron Front flag, and a with a backing chorale of little DIY-homemade versions swaying around it. And, for those who don’t watch the local nightly news, KGW gave so much of its opening segment to the protest, that they gave just a barebones reading of the final result – a frustrating 1-2 home loss for the Portland Timbers to the hideously-attired Seattle Sounders – at the end.

I saw boasts of victory scattered here and there on twitter last night, but honestly have no idea how this (profoundly silly) ban plays out. God knows what would have happened had Providence Park security waded into the Timbers Army to seize that flag, so thank God they didn’t, but there will be a next time and less attention, so there’s that…and, no, I don’t get it. It’s not like the Iron Front flag slips off the stick, floats into the night to stalk your children and Trump-loving grandparents, but willful misunderstanding of what antifa is and how it functions is all the rage in your more self-interested political circles (who brought the bag of dicks to the potluck, dammit?).

Reports of a meltdown at the Timbers Army by Timbers owner Merritt Paulson for “costing us the game” spiced the post-game lather as well, and it’s worth contrasting a rich man whining about a group of people interfering with his vanity project against the same people displaying their anxiety about white supremacist douches popping up all over the country like poison mushrooms (and with President of the country winking encouragement its way). Call me crazy, but one of those feels bigger than the other. That feels like this political moment in microcosm, as well my expectation that our corporate masters would roll over for fascism-lite so long as the trains ran on time and people showed up for the games and smiled and sang and forgot all the trouble visited on other people, etc. Moving on....

Obviously, a game happened as well. It didn’t end well, and even that was a rich experience of more lows than highs. After going down two goals – more on that later - the Timbers pulled one back with a mildly cheap deflected goal by Diego Valeri; from that point forward, a barely competent siege ensued. A couple things stood out, both after Valeri’s goal and before it. When Portland tried to force the ball up the middle, Seattle littered the path with athletic bodies; as several teams before them, the Sounders seemed fine with letting the Timbers play wide and cross – something that did with a maddening mix of frequency and incompetence (fwiw, forty-five (45?!) crosses is high). To direct your attention to a more relevant part of the boxscore, the Sounders swept the defensive stats - tackles and duels, in particular - and that matches what I watched out there.

Portland Timbers 3-2 Chicago Fire: The Worst Rom-Com Ever...

The competition....

If you feel like you just watched the most pointlessly meandering rom-com in history tonight, you’re not alone. Everything from form to road records to comparative statistics to the Portland Timbers scoring the first two (semi-random) goals said that tonight would end happily for the Timbers; it was always a question of what obstacles would intervene to keep the lover (Portland) from its beloved (all three points). To start with the most salient critique, the plotting was terrible. In spite of a 3-2 win by Portland....yeah, I was bored.

Set aside the timing of C. J. Sapong’s second goal for the Fire – the rough equivalent of someone standing to object to the marriage only to reference something that already got resolved in Act II – because the whole goddamn production actually fell apart when the soccer gods decided to kill the villain in the 1st fucking act. First of all, who does that? Second, when Aleksandar Katai got sent off for (literally) busting Julio Cascante’s chops, this game was always going to end the same way – i.e., with a Timbers win. Tonight had all the narrative tension of the lovely couple playfully bickering about the color of the crockery suggested on their wedding registry.

That said, I’ll be the first to admit that I doubted Portland would score its third goal. Thank God they did too, because that was the only consciously-constructed goal that they managed tonight. It gave me some belief that they could score when called upon against a better team (if in the throes of transition), because I’m not so sure anymore. Don’t get me wrong; Portland’s first two goals were fine: the delicacy of Jorge Moreira’s chip takes real talent live, and it’s not like the Timbers didn’t find a way around Chicago’s stubborn defense to score the second goal; they still both had a haphazard, “look-what-I-found” feel to them, and this was against one of the worst road teams in MLS (Chicago), and one that’s hardly lighting it up generally to boot.

MLS Cup & A Season Review from an Unreliable Narrator

Is safe, comrade.

I’ll start with my post-match analysis of MLS Cup 2018: the Portland Timbers lost.

What? Matchday Central never put up a...but…fine.

To start, I didn’t mind the way the Portland Timbers approached MLS Cup; the coaching staff actually impressed me a little. They set the line of confrontation higher than I expected, but that worked out, at least until a goal forced them to chase the game. Prior to that, Portland did a good job keeping Atlanta United FC in front of them. I hadn’t looked at the box score till now and…wow, that’s a balanced game, even to the point of equilibrium. Well, everywhere else but the score sheet. And that’s how you lose a game, people.

Here’s the thing with the last game of a season: there isn’t much to say beyond who won and who lost. No matter how feverishly the players itch for that shot a redemption, the next game won’t come till the next season. And what happened was really simple: Portland let in two crap goals, both of them dismal two-steppers. The broadcast team lamented the heavy touch by Jeremy Ebobisse on the first goal, but it was Ebobisse’s search for a better pass that slowed him down long enough for Michael Parkhurst (dude, not the fastest) to pick the ball off his toe. Parkhurst’s tackle left nothing between Josef Martinez and Portland’s yawning goal but Liam Ridgewell’s failure to stick all the way in. In a bit of cosmic unfairness, Ridgewell starred again on the second goal, this time by losing track of Josef “Single-Season-Fucking-Scoring-Record” Martinez, who would knock a header to a streaking Franco Escobar at the back post, aka, the guy Jorge Villafana lost. Two massive two-step mistakes, two goals, and the rest of it becomes what might have been – e.g., what if Ebobisse powered the ball across the goal instead of cushioning the deflection too near Atlanta ‘keeper, Brad Guzan? Had the Timbers leveled the score four-five minutes after Atlanta’s opener, who knows what might have been?

I fretted a little theatrically over Ebobisse’s mental state in a since-deleted tweet, but that’s misplaced nonsense because good players learn from mistakes. We’ll see how he handles this one, not just next season, but over the next couple; that’ll drop the relevant hints on Ebobisse’s ceiling. On that, Ridgewell had a bad night, an unfortunate capper on a season where he’d shown the mental resilience of three men by swallowing a benching and surviving an injury to become a key steadying influence during the MLS Cup run. How far did he climb in my mind: a trip down memory lane revealed that I’d written Ridgewell out of the team’s script somewhere in the middle of the season (Game 17, as it happens). The man enjoyed a side of redemption with his solid season, basically.

Sporting Kansas City 2-3 Portland Timbers: Conditioned to Believe

You are my God, there is no other.

Where to begin? With the ass-clenching anxiety of the final 30+ minutes, the beside-myself joy, or empathy for Sporting Kansas City for having the year they had and, yeah, Zarek Valentin probably really should have been sent off for a second yellow…

…then again, I’m good with that so long as you are…and, clearly, I’m only addressing persons outside the greater Kansas Citys, MO/KS and/or Seattle, WA metro areas. That was fucking incredible, right, a miracle on frosted grass (they play on grass in KC, right?), and a smoldering tribute to the lately infectious power of positive thinking?

As alluded to in the penumbra between the words above, the Portland Timbers advanced to MLS Cup 2018 on the back of a 3-2 road win in Kansas City, MO. Exactly two teams of 18 left Children’s Mercy Park with a win in all of 2018, a fact that threads garish neon threads around Portland’s accomplishment for tonight. And, for the record, I’m entirely serious about sparing a thought for everyone involved in the Sporting Kansas City organization and fan base (except the assholes who threw shit on the field after Portland’s second, stumbling goal; and, while I’m on it, has anyone else ever seen a coach step out to appeal to his crowd’s better angels like Peter Vermes did tonight (#StockRising)?). They believed every bit as inordinately in SKC’s odds of victory as Timbers fans believed in their own going into tonight (i.e., most of the hiccups in faith were my own), but that surely dissolved the second after Diego Valeri sank to his knees in disbelief after he scored his make-your-own-luck header (e.g., the "second, stumbling goal" noted above). I’ve never felt as close to him as I did in that moment (I'm buyin' the rounds, Diego!). And then Valeri got another one, and off the counter that would always follow so long as SKC pressed too high and the Timbers had available outlets…

…sorry, pausing again. Does this feel like ecstasy to anyone else? I mean the drug, not the state of mind. I’m just really, really happy right now, and on the grounds that, holy shit…the Timbers did it. They did all of it. Three fucking goals, in Kansas City, which, for what it’s worth, equals exactly 1/6 of the goals allowed in Kansas City during the regular season. (In the event I’m phrasing that badly, SKC allowed 18 goals at home during the regular season (the source of my math), and three goals tonight.)

I’m grasping at quantity because it’s tangible. But there’s nothing tangible about Sebastian Blanco’s equalizer, aka, the goal he seemed destined to score since 2018 started. That shit is permanently transcendent, just like Dairon Asprilla’s equalizer against Seattle about a month ago; it’s lore for the fan-base, a permanent, defining “where were you moment” that people will share – something that goes double if the Portland Timbers manage to claw their way all the way to the top, aka, hoisting MLS Cup to the sky for the second time in the franchise's short history.

FC Dallas 1-2 Diego Valeri: Call It a Post-and-a-Half...

OUR LORD AND SAVIOR.

The nice thing about playoff games is that they are fully and entirely present. A future of any kind exists for only one of the teams and that reduces everything to a series of moments - e.g., Diego Valeri (literally) slamming home a free-kick (and after FC Dallas players/fans had their beating hearts ripped from their chests), or Jeff Attinella smartly positioning his head to deflect a sure goal off his crossbar. C’mon, you know Jeff went low and kept his head high on that…a master class in misdirection.

And yet, I find myself wanting to talk about nothing but those little steps up the several flights of secret stairs that brought the Portland Timbers to this ripe moment of possibility, and a 2-1 win over FC Dallas in Texas. The total number of staircases falls a little short of the Winchester Mansion, but the Timbers gave old lady Winchester a run for her money…and for saner, séance-free reasons.

Portland’s game-winning goal contained a couple of the elements - e.g., David Guzman, who served the perfect pass to Jeremy Ebobisse, and Ebobisse for having the strength to shrug off the defender hanging off his shoulders (Reto Zeigler, right?), and the speed to elude a sprawling, stranded Jesse Gonzalez, to feed the assist to Valeri, who, just to note it, looks spring-flower fresh at the moment. To credit one of the other final pieces to Portland’s best-possible puzzle, Liam Ridgewell has looked like a DP defender since coming back from a variety of ailments, both physical and mental. Tonight’s win displayed the benefits of having players fill in the spaces around the guys who drive the team - Valeri, Diego Chara, and Sebastian Blanco - and, more to the point, the whole damn thing held up in spite of Blanco hitting a couple strokes over par.

I want to pause here to thank Nate Silver for my late, heightened understanding of polls, statistics, and averages. By that I mean, one team having a 4 in 5 chance of winning a game means that the other team has a 1 in 5 chance by translation (association? alchemy? fuck it, I flunked two kinds of math twice). As he explained, that 1 in 5 translates to a 20% chance that something happens, and that’s at least a half dozen steps below rare. I put up a bunch of tweets earlier today outlining why I thought the Timbers had a better than even chance to win tonight (even if I lacked the won-tons to say that outright). God’s honest truth, I’d have put Portland’s chances at 3 in 5 to win, and for all the reasons I noted - e.g., rest, having sharper attacking players than Dallas, and, more than anything else, Dallas being shit in front of goal of late, and against bad teams. Traveling stood as Portland’s biggest handicap, but they goosed the odds on that by, again, resting their best players in the final game of the regular season. And, to answer the question begged in my post on that game, the gamble paid off.

Portland Timbers 0-1 Seattle Sounders: It's Time to Talk About Larry

Third image under "idiot son."

I’ll keep this short. (Now, how many of you guessed that I’ve started scores of posts with that exact same phrase, only to delete it when the proof slipped straight out of the pudding? And...failed again.)

To start with the short version, the Seattle Sounders (specifically, centerback Kim Kee-hee) pegged an own-goal off the heel (probably) of the presently-struggling Julio Cascante. They’ve built their late streak on fluky/lucky goals, Seattle has, and that one goal allowed them to smuggle all three points out of Providence Park  last night. The ending 0-1 score-line in no way represented the action on the field - see the box score and the evidence of the eyes of all witnesses to this, just, gross injustice - and, so, to wrap up the short version, those motherfuckers…

The Portland Timbers (I haven’t even named them yet? seriously?) played the better game out there tonight and were, without question, the better team. I heard talk that the Timbers withdrew into the safety of the “Christmas Tree” formation for tonight and the contours of the match bore that out: the wretched cluster-fuckedness and missed marks of the last three games gave way to a solid shape and, by the numbers alone, an improved attack. I also saw Zarek Valentin and Alvas Powell push high enough (if somewhat ineffectually) to give said Christmas tree one fat fucking middle section, so I’ll just say that the Timbers played in some way that let Sebastian Blanco and Diego Valeri get on the ball a lot, but all while keeping fairly reliable shape. And that worked well, Timbers players looked like they had a good sense of where to go, and what to do, and that’s good.

It wasn’t enough, of course, and that’s now four straight losses (can I get a “huzzah”?) Moreover, it became even less immediately after Seattle scored their shitty, slop goal. I had to check the highlights to recall the Timbers’ best chance on goal - for me, that’s Samuel Armenteros’ lightly over-heated header across the grain off a (motherfucking) moment by Zarek Valnentin.

About those highlights, they open with this absolute gift of phrasing:

“89th all-time meeting between professional soccer teams calling themselves Portland Timbers and Seattle Sounders.”

I can do nothing but applaud that man’s adherence to the strictest of accuracy.

Back to the gristly meat of the matter, there is not a lot of Portland shining in those highlights. Yeah, there’s the one shitty goal for Seattle fans to cling to (lo, it is their guns and religion), but this game otherwise played out as a futility collage, and with Portland trying more and suffering more disappointment for it. Worse, the Portland Timbers plus a slip into the permanent (frankly shameful) midnight of life outside the playoffs, and with the Sounders stepping on their shoulders to get into the light.

Seattle Sounders 2-3 Portland Timbers: On Confidence & A Larrys Charm in Your Back Pocket

Should make you appreciate the horror of this "good luck" charm...

I posted something late last week as a kind of ambient response to the “wacky unpredictability” of Major League Soccer as a league. I explained the theory behind the response in that original post - and at just plain fucking stupid length, btw - but, here, I mostly want to circle back on how the predictions I made based on that data fared in its first weekend…

…yes, I see the title. I wrote it. It’s relevant, so, please bear with me.

I made 10 predictions on 11 games (on Twitter) - I couldn’t get a clear read on the game that ended with the New England Revolution beating a struggling, game-poor DC United 3-2, so I didn’t call that one - but I got six correct outright. I saw the rough outlines of two more games and, honestly, that New England game broke down about how I expected it to, so that’s either 8-9 broadly correct predictions using what I now feel confident enough to dub The System (and that’s so, so misplaced). As for the games I missed, I think 9 educated pundits in 10 would have called those games the same way - e.g., the Montreal Impact has no business beating Sporting Kansas City and, while Chicago has some legit juice, they’ve mostly been good against weaker teams, so I thought New York City FC would beat them, but, nope, things panned out the other way ‘round…

…I’m also cognizant that NYCFC is adapting to a new coach and they’ve been a little more streaky than the top-, top-tier teams in MLS, so why not a slip? And yet, that somehow doesn’t explain SKC tripping over its own toes in Montreal. I might actually have to watch some tape on that shit, poke around for defects, etc. (Probably not, I got other things, but you never know.)

Contra (what I’m now calling) The SKC Exception, the Portland Timbers' 3-2 win over the Seattle Sounders made sense. It was also a big cold dish of revenge (BONUS!), but key, results-based trends for both teams predicted the distribution of points - e.g., Portland’s steady defense against Seattle’s sputtering attack, the Sounders’ global mediocrity, especially against MLS’s better teams (a-HEM!). Some recent developments - e.g., injuries to Stefan Frei and Roman Torres (aka, arguably the two ventricles of Seattle’s defense) - opened the chance for Portland to run up the score.

U.S. Open Cup, Portland Timbers 1-0 Los Angeles Galaxy: Good is Good, And That's Good

What Portland defeated tonight, helpfully translated.

Just real quick, in a fit of enthusiasm, I want to talk about the Portland Timbers' 1-0 win over the Los Angeles Galaxy in the U.S. Open Cup. This’ll be bullet-style (will it?) and refreshingly straightforward, but also stylistically frustrating. I walk the line…

When I talk about the Timbers being “good” - even in a post like the last one, where I’m shoving a ceiling on top of the conversation - a game like tonight is exactly what I’m talking about. This Timbers team is organized, it knows what it’s doing out there, and it has reasonable flexibility on top of all that. That’s how a team wins a “Cup” tournament - and, yes, I’m talking U.S. Open and MLS, if the stars line-up right - only Giovanni Savarese and staff haven’t figured out how to weaponize that yet, into the unstoppable force that wins titles without blinking. But it’s working well enough, like, nine games in a row well enough.

More to the point, Portland plays well. The team moves the ball to where it wants it to go well enough that I can poo-poo possession like the mediocre appetizer it is. The coolest detail comes with how they came up with a smart way to play the ball forward out of the back, especially against teams that press - i.e., diagonally, and outside-in; it doesn’t just beat the first line of pressure, it means the team can switch the play, or keep it on the same side.

After that, this Timbers team gets vertical real goddamn fast.

Also, Portland is fine without Darlington Nabge. I’m still trying to figure out if it’s not better.

Back to this particular Open Cup tie, LA came into this game 3-1-1…on that, um, just checked the opposition across that time (e.g., @ MTL, v. SJ, V. FCD (this was the loss; noted), @ Portland (the draw, and one of Portland’s flattest games of the season), v. RSL), and I take back what I was about to say, LA wasn’t quite so much on a tear as a run of reasonable expectations with good fortune riding in the side-car. LA is adequate at this point, maybe even playoff-reasonable, but that 3-1-1 amounts to getting results any team with a remote chance of success should get. In other words, this is a result to celebrate for the Timbers, but not get cocky about.

For those who do want to feel cocky, on the other hand (not judging; I’m raising my hand in that tentative way people do when they only think they know the answer), think about how Portland managed the keep-away, how they passed well almost as often as they did, the fact they created - what? - 4-5 quality chances, and that’s at a minimum. The defense cleaned up what it couldn’t prevent from coming in - and hats off and thrown on the ground in gratitude for the mighty, reverse goal-line header by Mabiala to make Portland’s one goal stand up.

Just to note it, even with Liam Ridgewell out, Portland has a decent four-man deep rotation in central defense right now: Mabiala, Tuiloma, Julio Cascante, and (worst-case) Lawrence Olum.

Portland Timbers 1-1 Los Angeles Galaxy: The Plans to Our Personal Death Star

And, if it's been this easy all along...?

“The Timbers run unbeaten streak to seven, draw 1-1 with LA”

Ah, the pointless urge to euphemism. That's the text the Portland Timbers' website put over the Recap/Highlights for last night's home draw against the Los Angeles Galaxy. I don't bring up the euphemistic phrasing from a place of disappointment, either, because the Portland Timbers were bound to drop points at some point, and losing a game is inevitable, even at home. The educated guesswork I put into Friday’s tweet-storm preview titled me against the Los Angeles Galaxy as the team to stall Portland’s winning streak, but they did. Time, now, for the post-accident ritual of checking the vehicle for dents.

I can name one right away (warning: this is bullshit): I’d got it in my head that yesterday’s game was Portland’s the last game before Major League Soccer takes its World Cup Breather. It is not. I’m less surprised about me boning a detail than I am that people didn't take the time to point it out the error and/or ridicule me for it (which leads to deeper questions like, does anyone read this stuff? Eh, barely matters. I think of this site and others as my own Zork-level The Truman Show (a carefully crafted reality of my very own!), but, to drag this conversation back on track, the Timbers do have one more game to go (two, if you count the U.S. Open Cup, and do I count the U.S. Open Cup?), and that’s against Sporting Kansas City, in Kansas City, next Saturday, and hopefully at a more reasonable hour. [UPDATE/Correction: Calling all scientists: I've developed a really screwy reading block that causes me to read "at" where I should read versus. The game against SKC next weekend is in Portland, I have no excuse, and thanks to a guy named Justin, who reminded me that I need to correct my stupid. Corrections always appreciated, honestly, especially with such a simple fact. Please read the rest knowing I know that now.]

SKC at their place will be a tough game, and now this becomes a question about the size of a letdown. Dropping two points in the final game before the break didn’t seem like much - think stubbing a toe at the end of, say, the ski run of a lifetime. The team would have a couple, three weeks to screw their heads back into the straight position, and they’d still have six reasons for optimism in their back pocket for encouragement. What if the Timbers close out First Season 2018 (e.g., the one that ends with the World Cup break, because Apertura is taken), with just that one point taken at home, when three points looked well within reason? If you’d read this site at all, this gets back into a favorite game of “blip” versus “pattern.” Time to keep checking for dents…

Here’s my big takeaway on yesterday: the reason that Portland stumbled yesterday resides somewhere between their consistent failure to anticipate where the ball would go better than LA and, crucially, the reason for that. This showed up early - e.g., with the catch-in-yer-throat moment when LA’s Chris Pontius slipped ahead of Larrys Mabiala to toe one off the post. That about being the runner-up too often became the norm by the end of the game.. The Timbers still found their spaces on the field - and even set players loose in wide-open pastures behind the LA defense (especially down LA’s right) - but LA also had a really solid afternoon of cutting out passes to Timbers players who waited for the ball to come all the way to them. They also started gobbling up the outlet passes Portland has relied on to start the counters the team has feasted on throughout the, ahem, six game winning streak*. The question is why?

Portland Timbers 2-1 Los Angeles FC: A Song for the Unsung

Yes, that fucking good. "Everyone around the world...C'MON!!"

To venture into personally unfamiliar territory, seeing Liam Ridgewell pull up gimpy made me nervous. I’m generally cool on Ridgewell, but I’d also bought into this idea of balance and roles within recent Portland Timbers starting elevens, and balance between roles, and that idea seemed…threatened when Ridgewell lay face-down on the turf contemplating his bad luck, and by the idea of any given piece coming out of it. And so early in the game, too…

To spare one last thought for Ridgewell, I’m happy he played his way (back?) into my heart and confidence (just…I’ve always been a hardass with Ridgewell) before whatever injury struck him today, god speed and scare the shit out of the other guys as soon as you can, Liam, and thanks! Conversely, I was absolutely fucking thrilled, 1) to see Larrys Mabiala continue to look like Portland’s best central defender and, 2) that Julio Cascante came in, had at least two massive moments, and, one threatening ball skipping between his legs aside, looked like he could start if circumstance or Giovanni Savarese came calling. And the team has Bill Tuiloma in the back pocket inside its back pocket, and he’s been competent, if not good, and all that together could mean a stable central defense for the length of the season. Even if you think a great defense is the worst part of a championship team (it is), they matter immensely, and the Timbers have a sorted, solid defense, or at least one that keeps delivering - even via the understudies. And that leaves them only needing a slick attack in order to achieve unicorn-awesome, a real thing, look at the internet.

Before leaving the defense, I want to salute Zarek Valentin for starring in this afternoon’s game. My sense that I saw his face as much as anyone else’s and more than most hints at how often LAFC attacked Valentin’s flank, and all the LAFC clearances he sent back into their attacking third after set-pieces kept Portland in at least three attacks. I'm sure other players' names will get more mention after the game, but I think the broadcast booth mentioned Valentin’s more during it; he was everywhere he needed to be and a quarter-step early. Based on the past three, four weeks, Valentin wants to stay on the field pretty damn bad. That’s…just great.

Portland Timbers 2-0 FC Dallas: On Good Problems to Have

Die, motherfucker!

Let’s face it: attrition loomed large tonight, as one Portland Timber after another threatened to limp off the field. Only two did in the end…the team’s starting centerbacks. No big whoop…

So, yeah, both Liam Ridgewell and Roy Miller left the game, to be replaced by a Tetris-esque shifting of players/positions, and Timbers fans endured scares here and there throughout the game – whether it was Fanendo “Brace, Y’all!” Adi hurting (was it?) both ankles or Diego Valeri lying on the ground for two minutes that felt like five games’ worth of no one knowing how to make the Timbers’ attack work – but Portland hung (hanged? nah, think I got the verb right) on for the 2-0 win against visiting FC Dallas, aka, the team most likely to (what? win the league? be broadly awesome? prove the reality of The Youth Movement?). And, while that win was mostly encouraging, caveats attach to this thing like remoras that suck blood and eat happy thoughts…

…still, good win. This was my best-case scenario, so, hell yeah, I’m happy. It’s just that…I know stuff that lets me (makes me?) look at this game, and Portland’s last, with the coldest, deadest eyes since zombies.

First, the bad news: this is not The Best Possible Version of FC Dallas. I’d actually argue that, for a team without Walker Zimmerman, Matt Hedges (who is…just holy shit good), and Kellyn Acosta, Dallas played above their available level. God knows they made Portland labor to score – even as both goals resulted from the kind of fuck-ups that drive coaches to drink and/or early retirement. All in all, Dallas defended well enough tonight, but, when Adi stumbles just so, and after the kind of lucky bounce that only happens when a team presses allows Sebastian Blanco to feed him the simplest of passes, and when the other goal comes off another complete collapse, you credit the team that scored first, and ask what exactly went wrong for the other team very shortly thereafter.

Portland Timbers 2-0 San Jose Earthquakes: Searching for a Word...

Locked and loaded...

Well, the Portland Timbers won, beating the cranky, visiting San Jose Earthquakes 2-0. It wasn’t a terribly inspired win, especially late in the second half when San Jose bunkered to stop the bleeding. Portland tried to draw them out by dicking around with the ball outside the bunker, and the ‘Quakes bit from time to time, but, for the visitors, it was mostly about riding out the game, minimizing the damage, etc.

To my eye, this game looked a lot like last weekend’s 1-0 loss to the Seattle Sounders, only this time Portland didn’t make a fatal mistake. Portland looked both energetic and the better team, but they didn’t get a ton of great looks; I mean, I see the eight shots on goal in the boxscore – and I saw the three shots the Timbers bounced off the posts – but Portland also racked up 24 crosses, and that feels more true to what I saw last night. Flip to San Jose’s side and you’ll get a pretty clear sense of how lopsided the game was. San Jose didn’t do jack – even with many of the players I view as key suited up, e.g., Anibal Godoy, Marcos Urena, etc. I expected more from them, personally, but they did get cut off at the knees…

I thought referee Kevin Stott called a weird one – and not only with the rapid-fire (and, frankly, wrong) pair of yellow cards he dropped in the same minute to send San Jose’s Darwin Ceren to the showers. Stott would very indirectly even things out in second half stoppage when he didn’t call a gapingly obvious penalty when ‘Quakes’ keeper David Bingham tripped Portland’s Fanendo Adi in the box. (Portland scored anyway, so, up yours Stott! (Yeah, go to hell, buddy!)) It was kind of global, the weirdness, including things like calling advantage when there wasn’t an advantage worthy of the name, and I think Stott’s steady failure to call actual fouls in the minutes leading up to Ceren’s sending off contributed to how he and others (Urena stood out here) started caroming all around the field. Again, the most important thing a referee can do is set a tone that keeps the game competitive and minimally violent. Setting the tone with a second yellow so soon after the first feels a little like shooting the tenth in a series of jaywalkers to send a message.

Seattle Sounders 1-0 Portland Timbers: That Little Bit of (Fucking) Quality

The "little red man." (At least you're as creeped out as me.)

Well, I had big plans to watch the condensed version of the Seattle Sounders FC narrow, weird win over the Portland Timbers before posting thoughts on it. Postponed writing about it a day – killed some brain cells, lost some memories in the meantime (plus, another day older; gets more relevant all the damn time) – to give MLSLive time to post the condensed version…which they have still yet to do. And, no, there’s no way in Hell I’m sitting through that whole game all over again.

With that, you’re stuck with my lousy memory, or just taking a pass on reading this. As always, no judgment…

This happens more often than soccer fans like to admit – i.e., games that feel like a lot of things happen, while, at the same time, not a whole lot actually happens. The boxscore for this one proved as revealing as I expected it to: the Timbers topped the Sounders in many of the key categories – attacking stats, most notably (fun little sidebar: Portland ended the day with 19 shots, but they’d fired 15 of those by around the 50th minute; hold that thought) – but one number should jump out, and on two levels: both teams put just three shots on goal. On the first level, sure, Portland out-shot Seattle 19 attempts to 8, but, if you’re wildly flailing shots at goal, what good are Portland’s 11 more attempts toward the plausible vicinity of goal, really?

Second level: that’s what I mean when I suggest that not a lot actually happened yesterday. From Portland’s point of view, they managed to turn in a better performance than they did in recent road games against the San Jose Earthquakes and Montreal Impact (a good thing), but those three paltry shots on goal tell a pretty clear tale: Portland didn’t have much luck penetrating Seattle’s area, the Timbers mostly played around the defense, and not through them and so on. A lot of credit for that goes to Gustav Svensson and Chad Marshall, in central defense, and gadfly Osvaldo Alonso and gadfly-in-waiting Cristian Roldan playing in front of them. Portland’s shots from range weren’t terrible on their own; they’re only bad in the sense that they were the start and end of what Portland could generate for offense.

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.

Portland Timbers 2-2 Minnesota United: A Comeback That's Less Stirring than Reassuring

Me.

With the Portland Timbers clawing back to a 2-2 draw against MLS new kids, Minnesota United FC, it feels like we’re finally getting to a place where fans and weirdos like me have a deep enough sandbox to play in. This being (my personal) first contact with Minnesota, I want to dig into them first.

Overall, though, tonight’s lessons are:

1) Minnesota has enough of a plan.

2) Portland has a better one.

3) And Portland has both (some) depth and a plan for it.

All that’s pure speculation, of course, me projecting fantasies into a Being Caleb Porter automaton that is more me than Caleb Porter, and therefore is it really Caleb Porter?

At any rate, on Minnesota United FC

Combine a little distraction (e.g., dinner and Grammys) with a more than a little unfamiliarity, I cannot tell a lie, but I’m not sure about when, if or whether Minnesota made changes on the field. All my notes are therefore, 1) general, while also being, 2) about players who stood out. All in all, Minnesota feels conservative, a team that will use solidity as a platform from which inspiration can jump that much higher, and I’m drawing that less from their roster, than from a one-game sample – tonight’s game, in fact, and that’s totally it. You’ve been warned.

The one player I kept seeing for Minnesota was their Brazilian midfielder, Ibson. And, for frame of (potentially meaningless) reference, Ibson’s more Dunga than Socrates. Based on tonight’s game, he plays more safety valve than weapon, and that’s nothing to sniff at: teams need calm and pacing and Ibson looked good in that role. It probably also helps that he's familiar to the club, a sort of anchor for the transition. He also benefitted from having a stopping block behind him in the person of Joseph Greenspan (yep, U.S. Navy kid); he’s a big kid, maybe the next Axel Sjoberg, even though Greenspan never looked as elegant. So long as Minnesota has Kevin Molino (who not so much smoked as evaporated (an admittedly stranded Zarek Valentin), Christian Ramirez’s (at-first-blush) intriguing attacking tools, and – golly! – if Bashkim Kadrii didn’t present as someone to watch this 2017: yeah, I think they have stuff to work with. I don’t expect a flawless start, but that team – the one I saw for the first and only time – looked like they’ll be competitive enough.

Downed by Dallas: Some Cheap Hope and a Remedy

I call it Plan P. You WILL remember!

I was able to believe that the Portland Timbers would find their way back into the game for quite a while. Until the 53rd minute, to put a number on it. That I felt like Portland had a chance against FC Dallas going in very likely had something to do with it; I mean, who doesn't want to see his/her hunches confirmed? And it's not like the Timbers didn't give people reason to hope: about five minutes after Dallas' opener a long ball from Liam Ridgewell found Lucas Melano over the top, who forced an error from Dallas 'keeper Chris Seitz, and one big enough to keep Dallas' defense dancing for a few full seconds. Even after Dallas raised the margin for victory to 2-0 at the very end of the first half, Melano meandered across the top of Dallas' attacking third, a move that, 1) threw off Dallas' defense and, 2) put him in position to later thunder a shot off the crossbar. It didn't go in, nor did Fanendo Adi's follow-up header. Still, think what drawing first blood in the second half could have meant to the contest. Or think what an answer to Dallas' first (soft) goal five minutes after it happened could have meant.

That paragraph above is loaded with a whole lotta what-might-have-been. Things felt decidedly over, sadly, once Walker "I Make 'O' Faces" Zimmerman blasted the ball over Jack Jewsbury's head and past Portland 'keeper Jake Gleeson for Dallas' third, final, and entirely sufficient goal in the ultimate 3-1 win (and with Steven Taylor clinging to Zimmerman's jersey like a damsel begging him not to leave). Zimmerman's goal launched the inquiry, basically, into what went wrong in Dallas this past Saturday.

I thought I had a pretty good narrative, one that I typed into my phone on the (long, almost interminable, really) train ride home. Those notes flagged details like a reminder of Portland's better days, back when the double pivot worked, germs of a theory on why Ridgewell and S. Taylor (goddammit, guys; sign fewer Taylors!) make for a lousy tandem, a belief that Dallas turned Diego Valeri invisible in the second half, and, finally, they argued that the Timbers have a "wing" problem. It all sounded very simple, basically.

Portland v. Vancouver: A Timely Experiment (that should end right now).

Not pictured: Blas Perez running in to kick these kids.

Well, that was fun, yeah? Seeing a collection of (metaphorical) toddlers run out against a bunch of (metaphorical) first-teamers. (OK, yes, low blow. Vancouver Whitecaps fans, you have my apologies. And yet...)

Immediately after I told the guy sitting next to me something to the effect that the Portland Timbers were doing pretty well in terms of keeping Vancouver's first team off the scoreboard? Of course they scored. Of course...a better fan would have gone piss immediately after to insure that the Timbers would have scored in his absence. I guess I'm not that fan, but, then again, scoring wasn't really on the cards for the Portland Timbers tonight, was it?

In case it's not clear by now, the Portland Timbers trotted out a clear B-Team tonight, to play against....yep, that's pretty much the Vancouver Whitecaps starting eleven. Well, give or take on Vancouver's starting eleven, but, still, they had more of their A-team in the game than Portland did, and by a country mile. Any Timbers fans losing his/her mind over this....well, first of all, he/she shouldn't. Not even the guy on the MAX who wondered out loud to his girlfriend how a team that won MLS Cup only a few months ago could lose at home in their preseason. He seemed especially disappointed that this happened right after beating Minnesota United so comprehensively just a few nights ago? It's not that shocking, is it? (And, to his credit, the same guy acknowledged shortly thereafter that Portland started virtually none of their, uh, starters, so...again, he was surprised, why?).

Speaking for myself, I didn't know what to expect when I showed up tonight – and that's mostly down to willful ignorance of Portland's staring eleven on any given match day. With that in mind, any and all can paint me all colors of giddy about what I watched out there tonight – e.g., our depth against (most of) an MLS club that many people expect to do pretty well in 2016. For this lukewarm mess of a team to lose just 2-0 to a club that scored once with a new striker (left wide-open on the back post) and again with one of last year's starters? Well, I wouldn't say I learned a ton about what to expect from the Timbers as a team this year. What I did learn, however, was a thing or two about Portland's depth, plus a likely sub here, maybe a starter there. And that's what the rest of this will be about. Ready, steady...go!

On Portland's Win Over Minnesota: Dominance and Vulnerability

Second guy from right? Me. Totally me.

At the end of the first half of Portland Timbers v. Minnesota United, I tweeted something pretty close to, "we're not gonna learn much from this one." No combination of actions, events or words captured that better than the Timbers third goal (of four) – e.g. the one that saw a minimum of five Timbers work the ball inside from the (eternally wide-open) right side of the field, from whence, Portland shoved the key in the lock: Diego Valeri fed Darlington Nagbe who slipped past three defenders to open the lock, score the goal, and, pow! The rest was a pretty dull game. One in which I found the most excitement from celebrating how expertly Ned Grabavoy drew a foul on the top of the area (ball in, ball out, in, out, run toward goal, then...fall; Classic Theatre!).

Said third goal, Portland's, came in the second half, after three prior occasions, all inside the first half, when Portland waltzed the ball to 10-to-6 yards from Minnesota's goal before firing chances with better (more) or worse (less) odds for success. So, no, Timbers fans didn't learn what to expect when their team lines up against Major League Soccer's elite, but they do know just how much the continuity in the Timbers' lineup helps them. Just helps them. I was going to stick a metaphor in there (or a simile; still turned around on all that (don't get me wrong, valuable) high school shit), but it's wise to keep things simple sometimes, to just note that the Timbers ongoing understanding of a manageable set of some highly-effective roles makes them a very strong and dangerous team. If you asked me to assess Minnesota United based on tonight alone, I'd tell you they're a collection of doomed men who, given a year to explain it, couldn't tell you what they’re doing out there.

Anyway, the point is, the Timbers hit best-in-North-America form and shape only a few months ago. While there have been departures, and important ones, enough of the key pieces remain in place to create one a glorious goddamn puzzle. We're talking the Picasso, Blue Period of jigsaw puzzles. Every player not only has a role, he knows it. This is form making sweet, sweet love to function. Hold on...maybe this is closer to painting the Sistine Chapel...