The players are what matter most. Portland Timbers head coach Giovanni Savarese will tell you as much, as will almost every coach in Major League Soccer. Most even believe it, especially ones like Savarese, who spent decades on the field before moving to the sidelines. Come the final whistle, in a predominant number of games we watch, the players’ decisions, performances and conflicts decide the outcome.
The fact that coaches have to bring those groups of 11 potential match-winners together is what makes their part so intriguing. They’ll cover a fraction of the distance of their players and, comparatively, exert a miniscule amount of the effort. But once the ball is live, that one, relatively inert person’s view of the soccer world gets executed through the actions of 11 others – 11 who have to persevere against another set of directed parts.
Savarese knows a little more than usual about his opposite director, this weekend, a familiarity that played out the first time the Portland boss faced off with Wilmer Cabrera’s Houston Dynamo, this season. A 48-time Colombia international, Cabrera ended a 20-year career that spanned his native country’s leagues and Costa Rica with a small spell in Savarese’s adopted home.
“We played together, in New York for the (Long Island) Rough Riders,” Savarese said in his weekly press conference, alluding to a period that not only provided a coda to each international’s playing career but became a catalyst for a “friendship” that’s persisted into each man’s coaching career.
That’s part of what made the July 28 meeting between their two teams so interesting. You could see the familiarity, the gamesmanship, even before the match kicked off, one that eventually ended 2-1, in Portland’s favor. When each side shared their gameday squad with the other, it revealed a certain formation, one that websites and stats providers trusted and the opposing coach may have assumed the other would use. But come kickoff, each team was actually playing a different shape, Houston going with wingbacks and a back five after playing a conventional four-man defense for most of the season, while Portland did the same after playing a back four the week before against Montreal.
Both Cabrera and Savarese undoubtedly did what they thought was best against the opponent’s style and personnel independent of the duo’s history together, but in the shifting looks, the slight deception, and amid formations that seemed set to play it close to the vest, pounce where they could, and otherwise employ a coy approach, there was an unmistakable feel of familiarity. There was a game within a game that transcended an MLS match’s normal managerial maneuvers.
“You can think about things (differently) because you know the people that you’re friends with,” Savarese explained this week, “but in the end, it becomes competitive. You want to win.
“It’s like when you play with your little brother in the living room. It doesn’t matter if it’s your brother. You want to beat him. And if he goes a little too much, maybe you kick him a little bit, which is normal. But at the end, you sit down at the table, you hug each other, and that’s what it is.”
“There’s always a good friendship” with Cabrera, Savarese explained, while making clear that, no matter the opponent, “we always try to predict games, what [opponents are] going to do, how we’re going to approach the different situations.” The first meeting with the Dynamo may have taken that prediction game to the extreme, but it was consistent with what the Timbers have done all season. The game-to-game changes in personnel, shape and tactics that once surprised Portland fans used to Caleb Porter’s consistency now feel endemic to their club.
On the surface, those changes may take less effort against an opponent you’ve not only seen before but faced as recently as seven weeks ago, But Savarese doesn’t see it that way. At least, he can’t take the chance. In the face of attacking talents like Alberth Elis (10 goals, eight assists, this season), Mauro Manotas (12 goals) and Romell Quioto (four goals, 11 assists), he has to prepare for all possibilities. He can’t just assume that Houston will set up the same, play the same, because as the Timbers found out in July, the Dynamo’s forwards remain one the most distinctly athletic groups in Major League Soccer, providing an element of danger with and without the ball which, while not unstoppable, is unique to prepare for.
“Sometimes you play with the same team different times, and they present something different,” Savarese explained. ”They go through moments that are difficult. Sometimes there are injuries. Sometimes, they are going on a streak that they are doing very well. Every situation is always different when you play a team consecutive times, and this is going to be something different.”
In his press conference, Savarese alluded to Houston’s climate and the challenge of going to BBVA Compass Stadium, but the season’s course has changed for the Dynamo, too. When the team arrived at Providence Park, they had gone 2-1-3 in their six previous games, and 5-3-3 in their previous 11. They were good. They were dangerous. They were, in a way, playing in the image of last year’s Dynamo, a team that made it to the Western Conference final.
Now that’s changed. The team is 0-7-2 in its last nine, and while one of those draws was in the U.S. Open Cup semifinals (which Houston eventually advanced out of, on penalty kicks), the team’s MLS season is teetering on the brink of irrelevance. Strangely, the group still has a positive goal difference (plus-one, at the moment), but with only 28 points in 24 games, Cabrera’s team sits 10th in the 12-team Western Conference. Thirteen points out of a playoff spot, the Dynamo’s season may now be about the Open Cup.
Regardless of Houston’s form, though – and the considerations that will go into the Timbers’ first of three games in eight days – there will always be another level of intrigue when Cabrera and Savarese face off. And as much as each know that the game will be decided on the field, both know how they direct their players could make the difference in meeting number two.
“As I told him,” Savarese said, “unfortunately, both of us cannot win at the same time, when we play against each other.”
