Farewell John Spencer

It’s coming for a while, and on Monday, it happened. The Timbers parted ways with head coach John Spencer. Spenny had his moments in Portland, but never really lived up to the expectations (realistic or not) of both the Timbers Army and team owner Merritt Paulson. This is a great opportunity to look at Spencer’s record as a coach, and what we can expect from the Timbers now that he has moved on.

Records
Total MLS: 51 matches: 16 wins, 22 losses, 13 draws; 56 goals scored, 72 goals conceded.
Home: 14 W, 7 L, 5 D
Away: 2 W, 15 L, 8 D
MLS Cascadia matches: 3 W, 1 L, 2 D

The home record under Spencer has been quite good, and one loss in six Cascadia matches doesn’t hurt his legacy any either. The really damning statistic that will stick with us from the Spencer years (well, year and a half) is the away record. Two wins in 25 road matches. It has been a defining characteristic of this team over our first two MLS seasons that we simply cannot win on the road. 1-0 victories over Chicago and Vancouver have been blips, tiny imperfections in our otherwise universally dismal road campaigns.

Lately, that road syndrome has looked even worse, because of how well we are playing at home. The first half against San Jose was one of the best halves of football in Spencer’s tenure, but it was sandwiched between two 3-0 losses (away to Colorado and Salt Lake) in which the team did worse than lose – we gave up. The inability to take any of the momentum from our many home victories and translate it to success on the road is the biggest reason that John Spencer is gone.

Besides that glaring stat, there has been the inability to create a system to take advantage of star strikers. First Kenny Cooper and now Kris Boyd have been brought in to score goals, something they are certainly capable of doing, only to be frustrated by a system that never played to their strengths. Lately, the wing players have done more to open up Boyd in the middle, but it still feels like the inability to develop a Cooper-, then Boyd-centric system has contributed to Spencer’s fall.

So what will we see going forward? Interim coach and GM Gavin Wilkinson certainly has his part in the blame for the Timbers’ failings so far, and you have to wonder if such a team insider can really do all that much to change the direction of the side. We face off with the Galaxy on Saturday in a match that could see us climb up again into range of the playoff race, or one that could sink us as far away as ever from that glory. Things are so tight in the bottom half of the West that every win is worth a promotion in the standings, but that won’t last long. By the end of July, things are going to separate out a bit more, and it’s hard to say where we’ll be when they do. Sometimes, teams treat a coaching change as a chance to start over, and results improve. We can only hope that on Saturday, and on the several more match days this busy Timbers July, we’ll see that kind of reaction from the boys. RCTID.