Portland Timbers – Pure Icing

I started writing this before the halftime whistle blew on Thursday night’s playoff game between the Portland Timbers and the Seattle Sounders. Timbers fans, it doesn’t get any better than this. We are 2-0 up, on a 4-1 aggregate score against our rivals. They aren’t going to score three goals in the second half – they’re nowhere near that good, they’ve been beaten already, and the Timbers Army is singing in their ears. Portland is awash in green smoke. The Timbers are playing their hearts out, and their hated enemies look tired and confused.

Everything is going Portland’s way right now. Actually, that’s a poor way of putting it. The Timbers have made this happen. Put aside the regular season, which saw the Timbers finish first in the Western Conference! Yes, let’s put that aside. We finished first, so we can put aside what we want. Let’s look at the past game and a half (yes, it’s still halftime).

What do you want in a soccer team? In ideal terms. In global terms – let’s not have any relativism going on. Like, it’s pretty great for a small team in an inferior league: none of that. Wait a minute…

Holy cow! We’ve scored again! 3-0 in the 46^th minute!

Enough talk of ideal terms. This is amazing. I’m getting back to the game.

Alright, now the final whistle has blown, and the Timbers have knocked the Sounders out of the playoffs, albeit with a less empathic scoreline (3-2), but with style to burn. I’ve calmed down a bit. Seattle turned in two scrappy goals from set pieces – poor stuff for a team lauded just two months ago as the sexiest in the league. Sure, the goals made the game a bit more interesting for neutrals and delusional Sounders fans, but Seattle simply weren’t good enough. Clint Dempsey didn’t do much but miss and foul. There’s talk he’ll be loaned to a European team in the offseason; I wonder who’ll take him. Fulham would be disappointing.

So, I’d like to get back to the point I was trying to make earlier, the point where I was trying to put aside the phenomenal season that has just ended. The point about the last two games. The Timbers, in their first ever playoffs, drew their biggest rivals, magnifying the intensity of the games by, I don’t know, maybe ten thousand. Portland needed a result in Seattle, which they’ve had trouble getting in the past. They got it – the first game was a bunch of hard luck and a bit of good luck. In the second leg, at home, the Timbers only needed a tie to progress. They’re very hard to score against at Jeld-Wen Field and a conservative approach would have been understandable. You have the upper hand, so soak up pressure and counterattack.

Instead, the Timbers played the best, most committed 50 minutes of their three-year professional history. They pressed high, the midfield won every 50/50 ball, and the attackers played combinations at full pace. Their backline was untroubled and Seattle was torn apart. I was reminded, and I don’t make this comparison lightly, of Borussia Dortmund’s all-out game. It was truly thrilling to watch. And the crowd … Let’s just say “Soccer City USA” really isn’t hyperbole. It gets loud in there. I have often felt that something great was brewing here, in the American culture of the sport, and this game was like a long trail of exclamation points following that thought. It feels big now, but give it a decade. It’s going to be huge.

In the pregame on TV, one of the commentators likened the Portland/Seattle rivalry to that of Argentina’s River Plate and Boca Juniors. He said (his British accent an assurance to us insecure Americans that his footballing opinion was spot-on) that the derby rivaled any in the world. Celtic/Rangers, the lot. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves – it’s just not like that. But the thing is, there’s no reason that it has to be like that. We’re new. It’s great as it is. And it’s getting even better.