BEAVERTON, Ore. – The lack of change is comforting. Then, your cynicism kicks in, and your doubts. That’s when you let yourself become alarmed.
When you hear Portland Timbers players talk about the team’s current state – an 0-2-1 beginning that’s cast them in a second consecutive slow start – there’s no panic, yet. Even in a change of language that strives for solutions, there’s less urgency than acknowledgement. The team is nearly a month into their campaign, and they’re still searching for their first victory, but in their words, responses and tones, a measured view is winning out.
“Right now, the results aren’t good, but I think the team is prepared to change that,” veteran midfielder Diego Chara said, earlier this week. The rest of his words could apply to any other week’s preparation: “We worked hard this week, and we will be ready for the next game.”
Is that measured view a good thing, though? The question has to be asked. Three matches into a 34-games season, “yes” is probably the right answer. Probably, even if no three-game losing streak is the same. Some are born of bad luck and circumstance. Some portend something worse. Right now, with the Timbers, it’s impossible to tell.
On one hand, the team has allowed 10 goals in three games, an historically-poor start to a season, and one that hasn’t been fueled by games against the league’s juggernauts. Los Angeles FC, the Timbers’ second opponent, is going to be one of the league’s better teams, but the Colorado Rapids and FC Cincinnati? As both showed, they can be dangerous any weekend. But few were casting them into the postseason at the season’s starts.
Yet there is an undeniable reality to what people like Timbers’ captain Diego Valeri have said about the slow start. This isn’t about teams, from kick to whistle, dominating Portland. This is about moments, and while those moments don’t count any less on the scoresheet, it means solutions might be isolated – not overhauls.
“I think if you look at the games, the last games, without the five-, six-minute stretches where we allowed too many goals, the games look completely different,” Valeri explained, in Spanish, this week. “With both the game in LA and in Cincinnati, you’re almost always behind, then the scoreboard starts working against you even more from those minutes between the 60th and 75th, and the game is more or less decided.
“I think if we can prevent that – improve in those moments – we’re going to have a much better chance to change our course and start making the difference we need on the scoreboard.”
There have to be solutions – more concrete ones than merely playing better. That much is obligatory, and unfortunately, every game that passes without answers fuels concern that those solutions may not come. This Sunday evening’s visit to the LA Galaxy represents a stern challenge, but it’s a challenge which, last fall, the Timbers could have met. Ultimately, the team needs to get back to that level.
Here are three areas of focus ahead of this weekend’s match – our KeyBank Scouting Report:
Is the defense fixed?
Three goals allowed in Colorado looked like an aberration, snow-fueled. The four that followed the next week, at Banc of California Stadium? It felt like a talented team (LAFC) getting on run. Yet when FC Cincinnati scored three times against the Timbers on March 16, the pattern became undeniable. The Timbers’ defense was broken.
In terms of that problem, the just-passed bye week came at the perfect time, even if three key elements of the defense – Claude Dielna, Larrys Mabiala and Bill Tuiloma – spent significant swathes of the break away from Portland, tending to matters with their green cards. Even with those absences, the entire group was able to take a step back, regroup, and prepare for the new plans the coaching staff had for them.
And make no mistake: There needs to be something new. Principles will stay the same, as will the talent, but the mistakes that became patterns over the season’s first three weeks have to be accounted for. Why were we seeing repeated failures defending in wide areas? What errors were leading to those chances? Why wasn’t the group able to, on the fly, find solutions to those problems?
They’re questions that have been present since week one; now, though, they take on a more urgent tone. That tone may not be evident in players’ words and responses, but it is evident in the points column.
Living with a healthy fear
Turns out, the worst part about a losing streak isn’t the losses. It’s not knowing when they will stop. The moment a poor performance is finished, you can leave it on the field, while eventually taking time to consider why it happened. But until a good result arrives, you live in doubt it will ever come.
That’s why it’s impossible not to think of the bad timeline, one where next Wednesday, Thursday, Friday arrive, the team is building to its next game – in San Jose, against the Earthquakes – and the sense of doubt has only grown. If today is what it feels like when two winless becomes three, how does it feel when three becomes four?
The Timbers went through this last year, going into the sixth game of the season with no wins and only two points. But that memory should fuel a healthy fear. True, the team rebounded from that, eventually claiming a spot in the league’s final game, but life around that five-game “run” wasn’t fun, nor were the trials the team put itself through to find new solutions.
At this point, new solutions have to come. The Timbers are already in that space. But a fear of spending too much time with that ennui can serve as motivation. The next game is always a chance to make your life better, and that next game comes Sunday.
There are no one-man teams
Beyond the realities of the Timbers’ start, much of the talk around Sunday’s game has concerned one man – somebody who has come to overshadow much of what was, at one time (and perhaps still is), the league’s most recognizable team. Perhaps it was the same in the days of David Beckham, whose global brand has a power few of us U.S.-based sorts truly know, but this era of Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s team has a more singular feel. There are no Cup runs to accentuate his stardom, as there were in Beckham’s time in Carson, California. And while the Galaxy still have other prominent talents, the days of running mates like Landon Donovan, Omar Gonzalez and Robbie Keane feel so long ago.
That feeling, however, means players like Jonathan Dos Santos get overlooked. How can you forget a 40-time Mexican international with a Barcelona pedigree? Such is the shadow Ibrahimovic has cast, thus far. Players like U.S. international midfielders Sebastian Lletget and Joe Corona also need not be overlooked, while role players like winger Emmanuel Boateng can, as he showed against the Timbers last year, prove decisive forces.
And, of course, there is Ibrahimovic himself, who has 25 goals in 28 games in Major League Soccer. He’s missed two games this season, thus far, but he’s expected to play Sunday, naturally casting him in the middle of fans’ and coaches’ focus. Yet too much time spent staring at one talent means, often, the threats around him become blurred. And in those foggy areas we too often ignore, a team’s others threats can grow. As their recent Zlatan-less win over Minnesota United FC showed, the Galaxy have more than one way to beat you.
