Portland Timbers 0-1 Portland Timbers (Fine, DC United)

These don't have a snooze button. There is no snooze button.

Well, are we all prepared to pretend Thanksgiving dinner came off all right this week?

[Ed. - Fwiw, the walkout by the Emerald City Supporters was the right response in my book; funny things could happen when MLS decides to make the ambience more appealing to right-wing supporters. I’d love to stop talking about this shit too, but here’s the thing: it never came up until the league started enforcing the ban.]

A fairly experimental Portland Timbers line-up came up against a fiercely organized DC United defensive set-up – especially in the second half – and the Timbers mostly peppered it with blows both glancing and wayward (looking at you, Jorge Moreira). Forced to choose between shooting into a thicket and trying to get around it, the Timbers tried the latter to fairly useless effect. On the plus side, Portland scored all the goals today – even the one the entire goddamn refereeing apparatus failed to spot (keep bringing the quality product, MLS) – they just scored them for DC, and so the game ended 0-1 against the Timbers, who no longer look like the 2nd-in-the-West “lock” more than a few of us dreamed of earlier this season…y’know, before some great thinkers decided to complicate the enthusiasm.

DC deserves credit for playing in the first half, because they didn’t do that so much of it in the second half. They didn’t have to either – see Paul Arriola’s near-miss on Andres Flores’ gift – because they looked ready and capable of keeping Portland out of the goal for another 250 minutes.

Portland held the upper hand throughout, but Bill Tuiloma’s own-goal at the 25th minute rightly tripped the “oh, shit alarm.” With the way they defend (well), a DC lead always had the potential to steal a result, and DC had found ways to unsettle Portland’s defense before the goal – e.g., Paul Arriola carving a seam up the gut. The goal followed from Ulises Segura getting around some scrambling defenders and hitting the cross that Tuiloma chipped in. The halftime whistle felt like hitting the snooze button, but the sense the Timbers would ever wake up slipped away bit by bit, starting with whistle to start the second half sounded. First came an awkward back-pass, then came Eryk Williamson’s yellow card; these were not the thoughts and motions of a locked-in team. The field generally tilted in Portland’s favor from there, but, hard as I hoped for it, I stopped expecting them to win around the 70th minute, and figured they’d fall short of a draw when Tomas Conechny’s fresh Argentine energy fizzled against the same low-block force-field that Portland could only cross into and over with toddler-like power and precision. That was around the 80th minute, but probably a little after.

Montreal Impact 0-1 FC Cincinnati: Taking Care of (Super-Belated) Business

Elvis would be super-belatedly proud.

I won’t pretend that was enjoyable. My phone became infinitely more interesting around the 20th minute, but I more or less hung in there (hanged in there?), with allowances for prep-cooking and my cat doing something vaguely interesting. FC Cincinnati was reasonably good for its 1-0 win over the Montreal Impact. In Montreal, too. I’m not sure that matters, because neither of these teams has a future that extends beyond October 6.

When Allan Cruz stabbed that lucky bounce home about halfway through the first minute, the only relevant question became whether Cincy could hold out for the 90+ minutes ahead (also, against pretty much anyone). Cincinnati answered by clogging the middle with a low-block, which L’Impact got worse at figuring it out as the minutes ticked higher. They found Orji Okwonwko on the weak-side a couple times in the first half, but he was offside or sloppy in the defining moment, and things generally descended into hope-and-a-prayer crosses by the end of the game, Ignacio Piatti looking about a month too early (for him) and too late (for Montreal), and a lot of aimless possession by Saphir Taider and Samuel Piette. Montreal never looked particularly threatening, so…yay, Cincinnati!

Cincinnati ground out this game and, based on the attack last night, and recent games generally, that looks more or less like the entire tool-kit. They don’t have an attacking upside to save them. Even with most of the season gone, you still see Cincy players make runs to the same space (Darren Mattocks is freakin’ awful about crowding the left), and don’t even get me started about transition – e.g., at least two breaks forward, and with numbers in Cincinnati’s favor. In both those moments (and maybe a couple others), the runs came straight out of a family Thanksgiving Day “Turkey Bowl” after “first dinner” and the first fifth of whiskey, and the final pass referenced neither run, so, no, I wouldn’t call transition Cincy’s long suit either.

They scored first, though, and that’s all that mattered last night. Well, that and Przemyslaw Tyton pawing away a rare, truly clean shot on goal by Montreal. Had that gone in – or even had Joe Gyau’s stumble into Bacary Sagna been called as a PK (I would have called it) – Cincinnati could have drawn, or, god forbid, lost this game.

Notes on a Weekend Without Soccer: A Position Statement

The past couple weeks, maybe even the last month, have been the strangest and most uncomfortable in my 23 years of following Major League Soccer. More precisely, the last three years have been annoyingly fucked up and the proximate cause is Trumpism. Anyone who finds that argument unfair, or just plain wrong…just stop. You’re wrong. Politics has invaded every inch of our increasingly cursed lives since Trump took office. Speaking as someone who has read and tracked politics for as long as I could process it, it has never been like this, not in my lifetime. The country is arguing very loudly about the kind of country it wants to be and the kids are, naturally, freaking out.

And that sucks. It’s getting harder and harder to find spaces where you don’t need to think about our visibly panicked and confused president, or the people who think he’s the greatest thing to happen to this country since…what the moon landing? Joseph McCarthy? Some mythic past a critical mass of people digested from television and now confuse for their own lives? The positions are so profoundly entrenched that people don’t even operate from the same reality.

That makes creating neutral spaces very tempting, but also impossible. And, to expand the conversation, the people who are grievously pissed about MLS trying to chase politics out their stadiums should consider how much that decision follows the same logic of trying to make public spaces secular, so as to not favor one religion over another. Personally, I’m delighted with religion-free public spaces (I’m merely agnostic on my more spiritual days), but tens of millions of Americans think that’s why the country is going to hell. As such, they keep fighting for prayer in public schools and singing the national anthem, like, way more often than I think they should.

The rest of this both carries that word “fighting” forward and also quietly lays down in a corner. Americans who wanted to keep God at the center of public life never stopped pushing to make it happen. And, when they didn’t get there, they created work-arounds, some of them frankly, racist – e.g., opting out of the public schools where their kids should attend, because fuck community if it means sharing the classroom with them (more on that). To me, that’s arguing that some Americans are more equal than others, and I’ve got no time for that bullshit, if you don’t like it, fucking pull on your big boy pants and improve those classrooms.

FC Dallas 3-1 FC Cincinnati: Getting Dragged by History

Like that, but a painful reality and not a well-staged stunt.

Yesterday evening, FC Cincinnati took three unwelcome strides toward raising the bar for goals allowed in a single season, plus another one toward the single-season record number of losses. With six games left on their 2019 schedule, they’re just eight goals allowed shy of one record and, comfortingly(?), five losses away from the record for losses. What’s left to say after that one besides, do your best to stay out of the record books, Cincy. Fail less often or more gently?

After playing FC Dallas to a relatively even first half – they finished with six shots each, even if Dallas held a 3-1 edge on shots on goal – the game fell apart one piece at a time to ultimately end in a 3-1 win for Dallas. First came two goals three minutes apart – the first a turnover that caught Greg Garza too far upfield thinking Cincy would keep the ball, the second an early cross to a wide-open Zdenek Ondrasek outside Justin Hoyte – then came Kekuta Manneh’s moment of dumbassery and subsequent ejection. Whatever thin hope lingered from Emmanuel Ledesma’s 64th-minute penalty kick (and it was a good call and a rare coherent attack for Cincy) evaporated in the split-second when Manneh shoved his hand into Bryan Acosta’s face, off the ball, and almost certainly provoked, but, when you suck as thoroughly as Cincinnati does, a cool head is just about all you have left.

Before anyone assumes they had a chance, Cincy added just one shot/shot on goal to their first half total – even with a full allotment of players on the field for 30 minutes of the second half. There are no positives left, only the hope of avoiding record-breaking negatives. COYFCC, etc.

Is it worth mulling over what might have been when it clearly didn’t happen? Did a scenario ever exist when a healthy, more sober/tuned-in Fanendo Adi lead a basically competent FC Cincinnati attack? Could having Greg Garza for the entire season would have added a goal or two, or kept four or five goals out? What if Fatai Alashe remained healthy all season? A question hangs over every position and the only answer is, none of it happened.

Portland Timbers 1-0 Real Salt Lake: Recalibrating Expectations

Did we expect too much too soon from Fernandez...?

To briefly walk through my stages of doubt and faith, real questions about what would happen started bubbling up around the 40th minute. By the 60th, I’d more or less resigned myself to the result going sideways and started preparing the proper language for recovery during times of struggle.

Curiously, it was around the 85th minute when I drafted the tweet I tapped into the ether at the fizzling middle of the 96th minute. Verbatim too. I believed the Portland Timbers would hold on around the 80th minute, and I was all but certain of it by the 85th. As such, this little flurry – as well as the red card that proceeded it (not the dumbest of the day, fwiw) – registered as glitches in the matrix, signs of danger from an alternate reality, as opposed to the one in which the Timbers beat Real Salt Lake 1-0 in Portland, because that was how the game was always going to end.

The thought came from a place beyond knowledge, like the future breaking the fourth wall and whispering, “it’s gonna be fine” in my ear. To be clear, this has nothing to do with clairvoyance; point in fact, I didn’t send that tweet in the 85th minute precisely because I worried about tickling the cosmos and jinxing the result. Still, the Timbers just seemed like they had it tonight – or maybe it’s that RSL didn’t – and, ugly and hairy as it was, they did. That’s three points, an edge over the (actually) surging Sporting Kansas City next weekend…and now we’re at the “real talk” place in this post.

First, this was a great goddamn win. I appreciate that might be hard to swallow for anyone who just watched…I mean, of course, I saw all the “what the fuck is happening tweets” around the 88th minute, not least because I floated one of them. All the same, the relentlessness of RSL’s press/attack was on full display tonight. They won every attacking category tonight and Deimar Kreilach alone must have had as many clear shots as Portland as a team; moreover, they had Portland pinned through the first 30 minutes of the second half, at a minimum, and they still had Joao Plata (basically effective) and Sam Johnson to bring on as substitutes; moreover again, they had a clear chance at the death.

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.

New York City FC 1-0 Columbus Crew SC: Scouting One Half of Hell

Yeah, no.

The first thing you have to take into account when New York City FC squares off against Columbus Crew SC is the simple fact that NYCFC is better, player to player. Jonathan Mensah played a damned solid game last Saturday and, within the first half at least, he was Columbus’ one, and nearly only, key player. NYCFC’s Maxime Chanot, meanwhile, played imperious throughout. Hell, Alexander Ring stopped at least three attacks by lunging his foot at the ball and gaining position; there’s a movie analogy for this and I’m loudly dying inside right now because I can’t dredge it up. Honestly, NYCFC made the defensive plays look so easy that it hardly mattered they (mostly) ran out of ideas on the attacking side by game’s end.

Columbus, meanwhile, held fast to one burning idea in the first half: do not allow a goal, even if it means playing Eduardo Sosa as a defensive forward midfielder (no typo). NYC responded by putting up most of their chances (shots turned out to be generous) during that same half; they had a 10-plus-shot-to-dick advantage, a 70/30 possession edge as late as the 55^th minute, and the one goal they’d need to put away the game (sneaky little shit of a goal too). The game ended at a sleepy 1-0.

The Crew came out to play in the second half and it showed; maybe it only took trotting out one of their real regulars - Pedro Santos, the inheritor of the injured Federico Higuain’s duties. They created a couple chances, they pressed a little, and, in general, they stymied NYCFC. And that’s the other key detail: Columbus sacrificed this result to rest key players – e.g., they didn’t start Santos and neither Wil Trapp nor Gyasi Zardes played at all (take it from a Portland fan; starting David “Fucking” Guzman is pure desperation). Crew SC kept its powder dry for Sunday, so 1) don’t expect them to bunker for the first half against FC Cincinnati, 2) they clearly thought they had a better chance to get three points out of the Queen City, 3) they’re totally fucking coming for you like a shitty Liam Neeson vehicle.

With that said, here’s how Columbus is, or has been (that’s “bean,” the English pronunciation) over its last 10 games: